Chapter Text
“I don’t know what to say.” Carmela’s voice is flat, a little bit nasally, like she’s trying to sound more pissed off than she is. Jennifer has to hand it to her—in the intervening decades, the former mob wife has managed to keep up appearances. Still with the nails, the hair, the jewelry. The lines around her eyes are deeper and she’s put on a little weight, but all of that makes Carmela look less—imposing than before. Less dangerous.
Despite the change in circumstances, Jen finds that she’s a lot more scared of this Carmela than the one who came to her office for couples’ counseling when Jen was freshly raped and only a few weeks away from fucking Anthony Soprano (even though she didn’t know the latter part yet).
Jennifer offers a shallow smile, sitting at a cafe table. “I don’t know what to say, either. I’m sorry my daughter made this your problem. I never…no one should ever have gotten hurt.”
She makes a mental note to fucking kill Vivian the next time she sees her hotshot lawyer daughter. If Vivian hadn’t gotten drunk and annoyed with Richard about the Italian-American ethnicity and experience, she wouldn’t have made the fucking 23andMe profile and spit into a tube to prove a point, and none of this would have happened.
(In Vivian's defense, she was raised as an American kid. Not an Italian-American one. She ate Kraft out of the box and, until she turned twelve and went passionately vegetarian, chicken tenders from a freezer aisle bag. It made Jennifer's life easier, since she didn't exactly like to cook the way an Italian-American mother should).
There’s a look on Carmela’s face that Jen can’t read. “You fucked my husband. That hurts.”
“I’m so sorry.” The words ring hollow—how could they not? That’s just what people say. Jen needs better words. Different words. Where the fuck is her English professor son when she needs him?
“You had my husband’s baby. I’d wanted to have another baby. But you had his baby.”
Jennifer can’t look at Carmela, but feels a bolt of steely resolve up her spine. “I’m so sorry to have hurt you, Carmela. Truly. I had no idea you…. But I can never apologize for having her. She is the best of this world.”
There’s silence. What do you say, Jennifer thinks to herself. What is there possibly to say?
“He loved you. He really loved you.” Jen tells herself it’s not violating confidentiality, that the ship sailed when she let her patient cum in her and had his baby, when they became forever entwined. “He may not have always shown it, but he loved you.” Carmela sniffles like she’s trying to cry. “Carmela, you were his home.”
Jen remembers sluicing down shots of pricey vodka before meeting with Anthony, when he was at his worst and she was seemingly trying to follow. When she checks the voicemail in her office, from one Carmela DeAngelis, she is very tempted to pull out out the Belvedere.
“Hi, Dr. Melfi? This is Carmela DeAngelis. Carmela Soprano. Um, apparently my Meadow has been in touch with your daughter and—well, I didn’t know you even had a daughter. Meadow has informed that they are apparently sisters.” A deep pause over the line that Jennifer can’t interpret between fury and heartbreak. “So I’d—I don’t know why I’m calling. I can’t believe I didn’t know.”
This is how Jennifer finds out that the Soprano family is officially out of federal witness protection.
And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with the ringing bell of a telephone.
“Did you love him?”
She shakes her head. “No, I didn’t. I liked Anthony—he was a very charismatic man. Charming. But I never loved him.” And wants to say—I know the different between the two, but I’m not sure Anthony ever did. She never loved him; the hardest parts of him leaving were always the child he had to leave behind, not her. She got on; she always would have. That is the way her life was designed: To go on.
Something in Carmela seems to ease, the evaporation of this tension of a twenty-years-past competition for her dead husband’s affections when she’d spent a while nursing him in sickness, had spent her life loving and hating him in health. “D’you think Tony loved you?”
“I think he loved the idea of me. I was never going to measure up to what he’d created in his head, though.” There’s a sigh. “He’s the kind of man where, when he found out I was pregnant, he seemed to think he could leave you and marry me. Do the right thing, kind of thing. I told him I wouldn’t marry him. Not to leave you.”
Carmela doesn’t say thank you for that modicum of decency from Jen, but then again, the psychiatrist never expected it.
There’s a pause. Jen takes a sip of her coffee. Carmela stares down into her cup.
“AJ killed himself two years ago.”
The coffee suddenly feels like it’s scalding Jen’s tongue. “Fucking Jesus, Carmela. I’m so sorry. He was a good kid.” Of course, what she knew of him was filtered through his father’s love and barely-disguised disdain for him, but Jen always had the sense that he was a rudderless boy who just needed help.
When Carmela looks at her again, Jen gets the distinct sense that she’s being asked for therapy. “Going away was really hard on him. I don’t think he ever adjusted. And we didn’t know how to help him. The feds tried to offer him help, but he just got worse. Started with drugs. All of that. I think Tony dying was the last straw. I just didn’t know how to help him.” The last part comes out almost pleading, for forgiveness, for something.
Tell me it’s okay that I didn’t know.
“Carmela, I’m so sorry. I’m just so sorry. My god. I’m sure he knew you loved him.” She doesn’t say that she’s sure AJ knew his father loved him, because she’s not even sure of that. “From my perspective as a clinician—there’s only so much love can do to help people who are suffering that much. It’s devastating. But it’s no one’s fault, Carmela. You need to know it was nobody’s fault.”
She watches Carmela crumple a napkin and dab it to her nose, under her eyes, nodding her head as if to say she understands.
Jen has this sudden flash of thought, that however hard it was for Vivian to have not had a father, she never had to give up her identity and move to parts unknown, she never had to forget who she was and leave everything she knew behind. “Anthony told me that you were going into protection, but he never explained how hard it would be. I don’t think he knew. I’m so sorry, Carmela. My god.”
He was only a child. A boy. A son.
Anthony's son. Vivian's brother.
Carmela's little boy. Who she'd bandaged and adored and fought with and soothed.
Carmela gives her this look, and Jen is immediately shamed. “When did he tell you?”
Self-consciously, Jen puts her hand to her mouth. “He wanted to see Vivian before he left, and he told me why he was leaving.” There’s a pause, and Jen feels compelled to explain, to justify herself, to beg for understanding. “He knew about her. He met her twice—once at my office when she was a newborn, and once at my house when she was a toddler, right before you left. I told him I was pregnant a few weeks after I found out.”
There’s silence. “Why’d you tell him? If you didn’t want to marry him and didn’t love him?”
It’s fucking humiliating to say this part out loud—how fucking naive it makes her sound, how dopey and hopeful and stupid. “I hoped…maybe that would help? I wasn’t helping him anymore, not really. He wasn’t getting as much out of our sessions as either of us hoped, I think. And I thought, maybe that would help him.”
She sort of wants to sink into the earth, having to confess this to his wife.
“How long were you screwing my husband?”
Jennifer thinks of all the times Anthony told her about his mistresses. Thinks that he never treated her like that. She never got the diamond pin. “Only once. And then I got pregnant.”
There’s a viperish comment about fertility on the tip of Carmela’s tongue, so near that Jennifer can practically hear it.
Why did she divorce Richard? Her mother has asked her this; Richard, after once walking in on her in an intimate moment (and being invited to join her solo fun) questioned it; Jason has wanted to know the answer since they told him they were splitting up.
They could have had more kids, if they'd really wanted to. They could have stayed together, if they really meant it.
Maybe the answer was Freudian: Richard saw her as a mother figure and then, maybe once their kid was mostly grown, stopped, and it ruined the dynamic.
Or maybe she reminded him of his mother that he’d always wanted to fuck, Oedipus-style, and after fucking her for twenty years there was nothing left to conquer in his psyche.
Or maybe she’d been taken by an older, erudite man, who practiced at Brigham & Women’s and lectured at Tufts; maybe that’s Electra, and it’s one in the eye for Dad.
(Joe and Aida could be so hard on Jen: On her grades and her body, on her ideas and her clothes, on her relationships and her decisions).
Maybe he got sick of fucking a woman whose freckles faded too fast; who talked too loud; who had too many opinions. Maybe he thought a different ethnicity, with different trauma and history, would better suit his needs.
(Jen will never quite know if he cheated, but she’ll never forgot the shocking whiff of some perfume she didn’t wear on his laundry).
And maybe she was a hot coed and he was an attractive professor and it’s like a porno or a plot; these things happen. People meet all sorts of ways, and fall in love, and build lives, and sometimes they forget to build their lives on something solid. Sometimes there are differences that cannot be overcome (according, at least, to Jen’s divorce decree).
It doesn’t matter why they divorced. It doesn’t matter what they became through couples therapy and joint real estate ventures and sharing a son. It only matters what happened after.
After the rape.
After Anthony.
Her life will always be divisible, understandable, from this vantage point. It is the dividing line. It does not matter why she and Richard divorced; what matters happened five years later.
Jen shakes her head like she’s shaking her thoughts away. And then the blonde just sighs. “I keep waiting for him to stop hurting me. He’s still finding ways to hurt me, and he’s dead.”
Jen reaches out for Carmela’s hand, runs her thumb across the ridges of her bones like she’s soothing a patient or a friend. Could Carmela be her friend?
“Carmela, I’m so sorry. I am so sorry that I hurt you.”
“If you’re so sorry, why’d you do it?”
There is so much she could say. The possibility—does she say the words?—stretches before her like some endless liminal space. “I wasn’t in a car accident, I got hurt” she says, cryptically. “He wanted to be there for me. It was wrong of me, to let him be.”
Carmela quirks a manicured brow as if Jennifer is fully and entirely off her nut. “He seduced you? My husband? I loved Tony, don’t get me wrong—but he wasn’t much to look at once our kids were in school. And you’re a smart girl.”
Carmela’s a smart girl, Jen thinks. Probing and persistent and smart.
And so she decides. Let loose the hounds of war. Let justice be done though the heavens fall.
“I was beaten and raped. And then I couldn’t have sex—it felt wrong. Anthony was attracted to me; I'd known that for a while by then. I let him sleep with me to prove something to myself.” It’s the first time she’s ever said it like that, thought of it like that—I took advantage of him, not the other way around—and it makes her feel nauseous, her mouth filling with saliva in a way that tells her she needs to purge herself of what she’s said and done.
But Carmela doesn’t seem to catch this. “Madone, Dr. Melfi. I’m so sorry. I had no idea. My God, what a terrible thing. Did they get the guy?”
“No." There's a pause; it's been years and she still cannot bear to think of the justice denied her even though the heavens fell all around her. "I don’t think I would have slept with Anthony if the legal situation had resolved and I had gotten closure on it.” Back to Clinical Dr. Jennifer A. Melfi, trying to keep the vomit down her throat. The sound of her name, her hard-won title, reminds her of herself.
She kept telling herself it was her, giving into him, giving into his attraction and desire at a moment she needed to feel desirable and safe. Was it really just her pushing him in that direction without her even knowing it? Is that all seduction is? Was it seduction, or something else? Jen still remembers the way he’d look at her breasts during their sessions as if he could see through her jacket and blouse. Did she unconsciously dress for him to be alluring, to be wanted and desired, this impossible object? Was it conscious, and she just didn’t want to admit it?
Jen puts her hand over her mouth. Carmela is still talking. “My husband always loved women. I just wasn’t always the woman he love most. But still, given that…I hope you didn’t let him press his advantage. He was good at getting what he wanted.”
There’s this flash of imagination for Jennifer: Did he ever make Carmela do things she wouldn’t have wanted to? Did she do them because she felt like she had to? What about his mistresses?
Did he seduce her? Did she let him? Was he taking advantage of her to get what he wanted? She thinks of him kneeling on the floor of her office, not to fuck her but to hold her, delighted at the news she was having his baby… Is that what people who would take advantage would do? Was she an instrument to him?
She’s out of her chair before she’s speaking. “I’m so sorry. I’ll be right back, Carmela, I’m so sorry.”
The knowledge of what Jen had done—that she’d been the other woman—had haunted her in fits and starts during her pregnancy. How she had met his wife Carmela, had heard intimate details of her marriage (albeit filtered through Anthony), and then had still slept with her husband. She’d done exactly what his mistresses did, had helped Anthony degrade and erode his marriage just a little bit more.
Sometimes these facts hit like a stab to her psyche, that she has become the sort of person she disdains. That she acted without thinking, and acted in ways that she knew would hurt someone. She struggles with how to understand who she has become, and if it’s permanent—if she always has to bear this scarlet letter, even if it’s only in her mind.
Sometimes she thinks about how her pain begat so much other pain, and it makes her want to scream at the iniquity of it all.
She kneels on while tile. And for whatever reason remembers this flash of a thought she’d had when Vivian was still only young—how funny that her daughter is musical when her dad’s last name is Soprano. Jen had played the piano since she was small, and Vivian had taken to it—soothed by it while a baby and delighting in plucking out little tunes on the keys the second she was tall enough to reach.
But what she remembers now is listening from the kitchen to her daughter, maybe fourteen or fifteen, playing and singing along to some classical standard, maybe Ave Maria. Her daughter’s sweet soprano voice, that grew higher and clearer in song.
Her daughter grew up to be a soprano (Jen knows, because she went to all of Vivian’s concerts, always). Her daughter did not grow up to be a Soprano (Jen thanks god for this every day).
Jennifer’s mind melts when she tries to tease out this particular irony. Nausea roils through her.
The door to the ladies’ room opens while Jennifer is kneeling before a toilet with bile and the bitter burn of her coffee coming up her throat and splashing into the water. “Dr. Melfi? Are you alright?”
Jennifer’s voice has the hoarseness of an acid wash when she speaks. “Yes. I’m so sorry, Carmela, I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
There’s a jiggle at the stall door, and Jennifer blindly reaches behind herself to slide the lock back. She feels a hand on her back. “I know you didn’t,” Carmela says softly, handing Jen a paper towel from the dispenser. “I know.”
Jen wipes her mouth and flushes the toilet, but rests her arms and forehead on the seat, and discovers that she’s crying only when Carmela’s hand begins stroking back and forth on her spine. “Don’t need to cry. It’s all water under the bridge. I didn’t even tell you the good part.”
“There’s a good part?”
AJ is dead. Anthony is dead. Her daughter has blown up a handful of lives and doesn’t even know the full weight of what she’s done and what she stands to lose. How could there be anything good?
But she can hear the smile in Carmela’s voice. “Yeah. My daughter really likes your daughter. Meadow’s really happy to have a sister.”
When Vivian was in elementary school, maybe first grade, she’d point-blank asked Jen for a baby sister. And Jennifer had to explain, very gently, that she couldn’t have another baby. But Vivian was insistent for the companionship and built-in-best friendship of the idealized baby sister she'd made up in her head.
Vivian had a sense of how babies were made, but it evidently wasn’t a particularly good sense—something Jen realizes when she hears her daughter’s plaintive request. “You can just ask Richard, probably, if he’ll give you one?” Her kid has no idea real about sex, has no idea about divorce or specifically Richard and Jennifer’s divorce and strange-bedfellows relationship, has no idea what she’s even asking her mom for. What she’s asking her mom to do.
Menopause has never been so useful for Jen.
“Sweetie, I can’t have another baby—I’m just too old. Sorry.” A pause, while Jennifer runs her fingers through Vivian’s hair.
There’s this look on Vivian’s face that feels almost like a condemnation.
About a month later, Jen suggests they get a dog, which is how she ends up with a cream lab named Zula and a profoundly pissed-off twenty-eight-year-old son who, it turns out, had always wanted a puppy.
It’s funny, Jen thinks, remembering that mortifying series of events—her omnipresent guilt, her daughter’s innocence and naivety. All while she wipes her mouth with a scratchy paper towel and squeezes Carmela’s hand like she’s trying to bless them both. It’s funny how things turn out. How her daughter has a sister, after all.