given the fact that your husband hasn’t been around for so long and that he has this violent streak, I’m not clear why you would want to stay in this relationship. You could claim desertion, or abuse—file for divorce, start a new life.”
“Oh, but I’ve given you such a terrible impression of him! He loves me so much! And he’s the center of my life, he’s everything to me! And we’ve been married such a long time. You’d really need to hear the whole story. This isn’t a marriage one gets out of lightly!”
“One never gets out of a marriage lightly,” I said, in my reassuring, doctor voice. It was the party line, but of course it wasn’t true. Nava had tossed her wedding ring into a coffee cup, and poof, she was out. I wondered again what she would think listening to Penina or Israela, the disdain she would hold for the multitude of women who remained loyal and committed to men who abandoned and abused them. At least I’d never disappeared for months or gotten violent. Why didn’t Nava appreciate what she had in me?
Israela was staring at me, a curious, almost bemused, look on her face.
I snapped myself back to my professional bearing. “Israela, it sounds like this has been going on for a long time. I’m still not clear why you’re seeking treatment now. How do you think therapy will be able to help you?”
She leaned forward in the chair. “You’re not the first person to tell me I should divorce him, forget all about him. All the neighbors say the same thing. But I can’t. I miss him so much. You can’t imagine how awful it is for me.”
“But you haven’t seen or heard from him in over a year . . .”
“I can’t leave him!” she cried. “He’d be lost without me. I can’t destroy him like that after all he’s done for me! And I’d be lost without him. He’s the one who rescued me from my horrible childhood, the one who gives my life meaning and purpose. I’ll never divorce him. Do you think you can help me? Do you think you can help me be the kind of wife he wants me to be?” At this, she broke into another wave of heaving sobs.
Her reality testing was tenuous at best. The guy was happily shacked up with another woman, had practically forgotten she existed, but she couldn’t leave him because he’d be devastated. She never saw him, but he was the only thing giving her life purpose. He’d be lost without her, she’d be lost without him. The thought of even trying to tease out the truth of this bizarre, dysfunctional marriage exhausted me.
I needed more context to figure this out. “Tell me about the rest of your life, Israela. Do you have children? Do you work? What about your family?”
“I have no family; I was an orphan,” she replied. “I don’t have any life outside of him; that’s part of the problem. Like I told you, he’s insanely jealous. I’m not to have any friends, male or female. He would kill me if I ever got a paying job; he doesn’t even want me walking about the neighborhood by myself. And since the intifada started, he’s even more opposed to my leaving the house—he’s terribly worried that something could happen to me. You know that couple who died in Thursday’s bombing on King George Street? They left two orphans, and she was five months pregnant.” She paused for effect. “He totally freaks out whenever something like that happens.”
“Well, of course,” I said, “it affects us all. But we can’t just stay locked up in our homes.”
“I agree, but he doesn’t see it that way. That’s why I wear that enormous shawl. I sneak around like a criminal just to leave the house.” Her voice went down to a frightened whisper. “He’s always been obsessed with the idea that I might be having an affair, but it’s not true. Don’t let them tell you otherwise!”
“Don’t let who tell me otherwise?”
“His friends, they’re everywhere!” She stared out the window like a terrified child, her neck stiff, her shoulders hunched in fear, and I turned to look, half-expecting to see a spying face hanging from the fourth-floor sill. Her voice was rising with panic. “He’ll be furious when he hears I came to see you. Just you wait and see. When word gets out, they’ll come to see you too. They’ll tell you terrible lies about me. Don’t believe a word they say!”
I kept my voice calm and professional. “But if your husband’s never around, how would he even know what you’re doing? And how would these friends of his know—”
“He knows everything!” she shrieked, in a panicked voice. “He sees everything I do! Don’t you understand?”
My heart sank. This was not, after all, some silly woman in delusional denial about an absentee husband; it was, more likely than not, a case of psychotic paranoia. I was getting the sick feeling that the day might end with another forced hospitalization. I kicked myself mentally for allowing myself to be bullied into taking on these new additions to my caseload. Didn’t I have enough trouble? I should have stood up to that bitch and refused. I’d served my time in the trenches, and I was now an administrator. Didn’t that count for anything? How had I gotten myself into this mess?
But even as I groaned at the hours of extra work, my diagnostic wheels were busily spinning. She was extremely dramatic in tone and mannerism, which was not typical for a schizophrenic. But then again, paranoid schizophrenics could surprise you—it couldn’t be ruled out. With such a full range of emotional expression, she certainly didn’t fit the pattern of a paranoid personality disorder. As a matter of fact, the most striking thing about her was her exaggerated affect, which suggested a histrionic or borderline personality disorder. Histrionics could be very loose in their reality testing, but her paranoia was extreme. And what about that neck? Histrionics often somatized their symptoms. Was this a physical manifestation of an extreme mind-body dissociation? Or maybe the whole thing was a manic episode. I needed more information.
But before I could ask another question, she offered her own reality check.
“No, of course you don’t understand, it sounds crazy to you,” she said. “You’re probably thinking you should lock me up. And maybe you’re right! I’ve been stuck in this insane relationship for so long I hardly know what’s real anymore.”
I was relieved to hear her so lucid and self-reflective. It was a good sign. “So you question your own sense of reality?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” she said, her voice soft and pleading. “But if you met him, even for an instant, you’d understand. There’s something about him. Once you’ve been in his presence you never forget it. When you meet his friends, crazy as they are, you’ll see how devoted they are to him, how they love him with all their hearts. Maybe then you’ll get an inkling of what kind of a man he is . . . and he chose me! Of all the women in the world he might have married, he chose me!” She turned her sad, luminous eyes toward me. “You think I’m totally crazy, don’t you?”
Yes, I thought, you’re totally nuts, but something inside me was stirred by her story. For just a moment I could feel her love, shot through, as it was, with terror and wounded pain. Despite my dalliances, I had always been attracted to my wife. I was devastated that she’d thrown me out, already missed the life we’d had together. But now I was wondering: had I ever in my life loved anyone the way Israela loved her husband, or even, for that matter, the way Nava had once loved me?
The feeling was gone in an instant, and I pulled myself back into role.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
She looked away, rubbing her neck as she stared out the window.
“You
