Page 414 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
succeeded and knew that I had when, one morning, I woke up, didn’t want a cigarette, and didn’t realize until later that I hadn’t taken note of the fact that I didn’t want a cigarette. As for Nadel, he actually lapsed after his booster session, started smoking again, and did not stop until about ten years ago, when he got, as they say, a warning.
But what is the point of telling you all of this now? For me, as ludi- crous as the methodology had been, after a month or so I was a believer. I had conquered an affliction that had enslaved me, and I was feeling relief and looking forward to a healthier future. So I felt that I was now at the point where I could announce to my wife that my evil habit was really behind me, and that a big problem was behind us. (I was cautious about feeling confident or celebrative at first, as was, I thought, Phyllis.) I thought that Phyllis, who, as I said, had come to be very angry about my smoking, would be relieved, happy about my accomplishment, proud of me, wishing to reward me. But she did virtually nothing in response to my victory.
There was no encouragement, no applause, no celebration. I confess that I was disappointed and hurt. Maybe I was reacting like a baby. On the other hand, maybe the lack of significant response tapped into more significant feelings, feelings that something might be missing. To me, the past fifteen months or so had been about Phyllis. I had sublimated a lot to her needs—properly, I thought—but my concerns about her father’s and Rabbi Turetsky’s omnipresence were neither acknowledged nor dealt with. I had written off Phyllis’s apparent distance to the severe shock of her mother’s death and to her normally non-demonstrative nature, at least when it came to me. But it seemed that something else was going on here. There was distance, and, as I would come to under- stand, it was widening.
Still, I don’t think that I recognized that an insuperable set of prob- lems had surfaced (as I now think they had). As far as I was concerned, until the spring of 1985, divorce was a concept that was virtually unthinkable. Sure, there were disagreements (fights?) and tension from time to time; that was inherent in any marriage. But divorce? The thought or threat of it never really entered my mind. I had seen divorce
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