Free Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright

“She doesn’t appear to be anywhere close to menopause. We did check her levels.” Pause. “Dr. Bearden, your wife is in
     good health but she’s depressed.” Pause. “No, it’s not a diagnosis, it’s an observation. Have you noticed that she cries a
     lot?” And then finally, after the longest pause of all, he says, “Yes, I suppose pastoral counseling might be a good place
     to start.”
    I’m fucked.
    T here was a part of me that knew we’d never actually see that woman therapist. When I called to make the appointment and the
     receptionist had given me directions, I hadn’t bothered to write them down. Going to see a therapist seems like a big step
     to a man like Phil, a public admission that something has gone publicly wrong. Phil doesn’t like big problems. Phil likes
     problems he can solve.
    By the time he gets home that evening I’m calmed down and chopping vegetables for a salad. He stops at the counter and puts
     down the mail. “I guess you’re pissed,” he says.
    I shrug. “I thought we could eat on the patio.”
    “I guess you’re pissed,” he says again, and without waiting for me to respond, he rushes on. “I know you might have preferred
     a female counselor, but I don’t think that would have been fair to me. A woman would automatically side with you.”
    What Phil doesn’t know about women is a lot.
    I look up at him and shrug again, more elaborately this time, so that he will be forced to notice my cosmic indifference to
     the situation. “She might not have been able to help us anyway.”
    My acquiescence makes him even more nervous, like a gambler who’s won an early hand. “The part you might not agree with,”
     he says, “is that I’d like for us to talk to Jeff. In fact, he called me today and for some reason counseling just came up
     out of nowhere. He’s agreed to see us the day after tomorrow.” Apparently I’ve been elevated to emergency status all over
     town. “And that doesn’t seem quite as drastic, you know, just driving over every now and then to talk to Jeff.”
    “Drastic?”
    “There’s no need to treat it like that, is there? Like we’re in the middle of some kind of crisis? I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t
     know we even had a problem if you didn’t keep telling me we did.”
    “You may as well start the grill.”
    “He’ll be fair,” Phil tells me. “No matter what you might think about Jeff, he’s fair.”
    “I guess so.”
    “You don’t think Jeff will be fair?”
    “I think Jeff will be fair.”
    “And he could give us a Christian perspective.”
    “Yippee.”
    “Don’t be sarcastic. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
    Of course we know what’s going to happen. I’m getting ready to get hit upside the head with a Bible. But I’ve been thinking
     about this all afternoon; I knew where Phil was heading before even he did, and besides, there are advantages to seeing Jeff.
     It might be good for down the road when I’m gone, and I think like this sometimes, I actually let myself use the phrase “when
     I’m gone.” Phil will need someone to talk to, so maybe it’s smart to draw Jeff into the situation, to maneuver him toward
     the hole I’m getting ready to rip in the middle of this family.
    But Phil is still troubled by my calmness. He had evidently psyched himself up for a conversation with a hysteric and I’m
     denying him the chance to use all his best lines. “I thought you liked Jeff,” he says.
    “I do, but what does that have to do with anything?”
    “He said the two of you had always had a certain rapport.”
    “And all this just came up out of nowhere? Come off it, Phil, I was sitting in Dr. Bennett’s office when he called you.”
    “Jeff was thinking we could meet with him together one week and you could meet with him alone the next. That way I’d only—”
    “Have to come in every other week? That would make more sense, wouldn’t it? Since you’re a dentist and important and I have
     all