Page 66 of Dirty Diana
“Diana.” He looks at me, as if for help. I must be looking at him the same way, a mirror image—two stricken faces—we’re both feeling it—the strangest sensation of looking at yourself and at a total stranger all at once.
“I need some air,” Oliver stands up, grabbing for his drink and finishing it in one big swallow.
I call for him but he strides out through the club and into the rain.Don’t leave, Oliver. Not now. We can save this.
“Oliver!” I catch up to him. “You can’t leave like this. Let’s go back in.”
“What are we doing here, Diana? This was a horrible fucking idea.” He finds his keys, finally, and unlocks the car.
“Don’t run away. Not now. That was the closest I’ve felt to you in so long. We can salvage this. Iknowwe can,” I plead.
Oliver shakes his head, pulls my hands off his shoulders. I’d been gripping him so hard. “Stay. Please.” I plead. “I don’t want us to go home.”
“That isn’t me. That isn’t…us,” Oliver says and he gets in the car, waiting for me to follow. “I can’t go back in,” he says and I see there is no changing his mind.
Once I’m in the car, we buckle our seatbelts and I pull out of the parking lot. Not a word is said. Another night ends in us both soaking wet, this time drenched in rain and a prickly kind of shame. We sit in it the entire way home.
Chapter 20
—
“Not every marriage that ends is a failure,” Miriam says softly. She reaches for another sip of her tea and Oliver nods solemnly in agreement as if he’d come up with this little nugget himself.
“Well, but it is though, right?” I ask. “I mean, a failed marriageisexactly that, a marriage that ends.” Why is Oliver looking at me like I’m speaking in a foreign tongue?
“Of course, Diana. But I’m not saying your marriage is at its end. The notion I’d like to introduce—that I think is important in our work together—is to understand the successes you’ve achieved together.” I’m so confused. Are we succeeding or failing? She’s been doing this the whole hour, talking in tightly knit circles that confound me. “Diana, you look panicked.”
All eyes on me again. “I just feel like, maybe last time there was progress?”
There wasn’t any progress. Last week, I’d tried to incorporate an exotic dancer into our relationship and now whenever Oliver looks at me it’s like he’s genuinely frightened of what I’ll suggest next. And now we’re here, to lay all the pieces in front of Miriam. And worse, now that we’re here, I can’t follow what she’s saying and Oliver seems to speak her language and not mine, and my head is starting to pound, just behind my right temple. I’d honestly thought I’d be better at therapy.
“Would you like to share what you feel has been progress? How did you feel after we met last?”
“Good.” I jump in too quickly.
Oliver looks at me curiously. “Which part felt good?”
I can’t think of a single thing in the moment. My mind goes blank as I grope for a positive detail from this week. “We had Emmy’s game. We were a real unit, it felt like, cheering her on.”
“Were we going to root for separate teams? At our own daughter’s soccer game?”
“These days, I don’t know.” If he is going to get shitty, I can too. But I want to demonstrate for Miriam that I’m in control. “Oliver’s a great dad. We love our daughter. And we’ve always been on the same page. So many of our friends argue over parenting—how to discipline, how much screen time, et cetera. I think it’s a big deal that we’ve never fought about any of it. We’re really good friends, who love each other.”
“Is that enough for you?” Oliver asks. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, I’m really asking.”
I pause. Friends isn’t enough for me. I know it’s not. “I don’t know,” I say quietly. I look down at my hands. I rub my thumb into the opposite palm and try to think of something else to say. What’s the magic sentence with just enough information to appear like sharing but without divulging anything I might later regret? Until I stopthinking of therapy as a game, we won’t get anywhere, I know, but I can’t seem to stop.
Oliver clears his throat. “We should tell her.”
Jesus. Why does therapy have to mean being honest about everything?
“Do you want to or should I?” he asks.
“I don’t think it needs all this buildup and fanfare, does it?”
Oliver looks down and mumbles what feels like a confession. “I’ve been going to strip clubs and Diana thought it would be a good idea to have a threesome with one of the dancers.”
“I didn’t ask for a threesome!”
