He talked about the dinner on the second night, which had gone badly. Not dramatically — no scenes, no confrontation — but Elaine had been exhausted from the day and had become the version of herself that is difficult to navigate: a low-level unhappiness that doesn’t have a specific cause and therefore can’t be solved by addressing anything specific. Nathan had managed it, which meant spending the dinner in a state of alert attention that left him depleted. He’d sat in his room afterward and done a thing he described as sitting with it, without quite knowing what it was.
“I think I was sitting with the feeling of being the only one there,” he said. “Usually Olivia absorbs some of it. Takes part of the current, is the way I’m thinking about it. And it’s not that I couldn’t handle it on my own — I could. But I understood, I think for the first time, what it costs. To hold the current.”
Dr. Mehta nodded. “Olivia, what’s it like to hear him say that?”
I thought about it. “It’s useful,” I said. “And it’s also –” I paused. “There’s a part of me that wants to be glad he understands now, and a part that’s grieving the years when he didn’t and I did it anyway.”
“Can you say more about the grief?”
“It’s not anger,” I said, trying to find the right words. “It’s more like — imagine you’ve been carrying something heavy for a long time, and the person you’re with never asked to help because they never looked at what you were carrying. And then one day they look, and they see it, and they say they’re sorry. That’s good. That’s what you wanted. But there’s also something that wants to say: I’ve been carrying this for three years. Three years ago would have been better.”