Do You Drive Your Man Crazy?

Diane Corde sat in the paneled office and flipped through a Redbook.

A. Taking skydiving lessons together.

B. Making love outdoors.

C. Going skinny-dipping

D. Taking ballroom dancing classes.

Diane didn't like the place. It reminded her too much of the office of the vet who spayed their puppies and dispensed worm drops. It was nothing but a cheap paneled waiting room and a sliding glass window, behind which was a gum-chewing receptionist, who seemed about to ask, "Time for Fluffy distemper shot, is it?"

Diane swallowed, dry-mouthed, and returned to the magazine.

Question 7. How surprised would your mate be if you called him up one afternoon and told him to meet you after work in a ritzy hotel room, where you would have champagne and caviar waiting for him?

A. Not surprised at all.

B. Somewhat surprised.

C. Very surprised.

D. Astonished.

Corde and Diane had met at a Methodist church singles supper sixteen years before, held in the boathouse on Seever Lake. Corde had shown up with only bags of potato chips, getting mileage out of a bad joke ("Sure I know it's a pot luck supper – y'all're lucky I didn't bring a pot"). Corde then spotted Diane Claudia Willmot arranging pickles in a Tupperware bowl and asked her if she'd like to go for a walk. She said she would, only wait a minute she wanted to get her purse, which she did, and they wandered around in the park until, thank you Lord, a roaring cloudburst forced them into a little shack and while the other pot-luckers were eating beans and franks and making forty-days-and-forty-nights jokes, Corde and Diane kissed, wet and hot, and she decided she was going to marry him.

She was four years older than Corde, which is a big difference between people at only one age – their mid-twenties, which is where the two of them happened to be. Crying, Diane asked him, "What are you going to do when I turn thirty? You'll still be young." And Bill Corde, who was in fact worried about the age difference (but because he thought she might leave him for an older man), told her something that turned out to be completely true: that he didn't think she'd go too ripe before he himself went gray.

One problem he hadn't counted on, though. Diane was divorced, married two years to a salesman up in Fredericksberg. They'd split up before Corde met her and when she'd confessed the marriage, nervous about the response, he'd smeared on the nonchalance real thick. But later he got to thinking about Diane and Stuart together and he claimed it turned his stomach. into a cloverleaf. Diane was tolerant at first but then Corde's insecurity began to wear on her. She didn't know how to placate him. It didn't even seem to make him feel better when she repeated over and over the partial truth that she and Stu hadn't had a good sex life. Although she didn't dwell on it she assumed that Corde had had his share of women and hoped it was true so that he had sowed all the wild grains he had in him. But it wasn't the sex that tormented Corde; it was something trickier – jealousy that the woman he wanted to marry had confessed secrets to another man, that she had cried in front of him, that she had comforted him. Corde could not be allayed, looking sheepish and sorrowful at this retroactive betrayal. "But it was before I even knew you," Diane snapped, and he got a look at her spirited side, as she'd intended. Corde brooded plenty and finally Diane called the bluff. "You gonna mope like that, go find yourself a virgin you think is worth all this heartache you're making for yourself."

Their wedding, the following month, was appropriately punctuated by an inundation to match that of the day they'd met. They both took this as a good omen, which had proved to be pretty accurate. Sixteen years of marriage and when they called each other darling, they more often than not meant it. Diane said the secret to their success was that they had faulty memory circuits and tended to forget rather than forgive the transgressions. The closest either of them had come to an affair were unpure thoughts – along the lines of those about Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner when Corde and Diane made love the night they'd rented Bull Durham.

They had weathered a near-bankruptcy, the deaths of Diane's father and Corde's mother, a stroke that made Corde's father forever a stranger and then the old man's death, and some bad problems when the family was living in St Louis.

Lately Corde was spending more and more time on cases, away from home. Yet oddly the brooding sense of threat she felt did not come from his long hours or moody obsession with his work. Rather, Diane Corde felt that for some reason it was the trouble with Sarah that was driving them apart. She did not understand this at all but she sensed the momentum of the rift and sensed too, in her darker moments, its inevitability.

She looked at her watch, felt a burst of irritation at having been kept waiting then looked at the receptionist, who moved the gum around in her mouth until she found it a comfy home and continued addressing bills.

Question 11. Does your husband…

The door to the inner office opened and a woman in her late thirties stepped out. She wore a beautiful pink suit, radiant, vibrating. Diane studied the dress before she even glanced at the woman's face. That is a tart's color. A formal smile on her lips, the woman said, "Hello, I'm Dr. Parker. Would you like to come in?"

Ohmagod, she's a fake! Here she is just a Mary K rep who won the Buick and is on to better things. As she stood, Diane thought hard how to escape. Vet's office, pink suit and the woman's only references had been the yellow pages. But despite the misgivings Diane continued into the office. She sat in a comfortable armchair. Dr. Parker closed the door behind them. The room was small, painted yellow and – another glitch – contained no couch. All psychiatrists' offices had couches. That much Diane knew. This office was furnished with two armchairs across from a virtually empty desk, two answering machines, a lamp and a clean ashtray on a pedestal. A cube box of Kleenex.

The doctor's thick gold bracelet clanked on the desktop as she uncapped a pen and took a notebook from the desk.

On the other hand, the doctor passed the wall test. One side of the room was filled with somber, stout books like Psychodynamics in the Treatment of Near-Functioning Individuals and Principles of Psychopharmacology. On the facing wall were the diplomas. Dr. Parker had graduated from the University of Illinois, cum laude, from Northwestern Medical School and from the American College of Psychiatrists. Three schools! Diane, who had limboed out of McCullough Teachers' College with a B-minus average, looked at the squirrelly proclamations full of Latin or Greek phrases and seals and stamps then turned back to find the doctor gazing expectantly at her.

"Well," Diane said, and folded her sweating hands in her lap. She felt the wave of tears slosh inside her. She opened her mouth to tell the doctor about Sarah and said instead, "Are you new in town?"

"I opened my practice a year ago."

"A year," Diane said. "New Lebanon a little quiet for you?"

"I like small towns."

"Small towns." Diane nodded. A long moment of silence. "Well, it is a small town. That's true."

Dr. Parker said, "When you called you mentioned your daughter. Why don't you tell me about her."

Diane's mind froze. "Well."

The doctor's pen hovered, ready to scoot along the paper, dragging the eighteen-karat bracelet behind.

Diane blurted, "Our Sarah's been having some problems in school."

"How old is she?"

"Nine."

"And how many months?"

"Uh, six."