Days of Awe (17 page)

We stood in the fading light of his spotless kitchen. It seemed like everything important in my life happened in a kitchen, accompanied by the background music of a refrigerator's hum. Why wasn't I an astronaut or a mountain climber? No, this was my big moment, witnessed by a sink and a stove, a three-armed espresso machine and an expensive-looking blender and approximately fifteen cans of soup lined up neatly on a bottom shelf and all those boxes of pasta.

I was filled with such a baffling blend of sadness and desire that I could hardly stand, lust and loss pulsing through me like my own blood, like life.

We were so near to each other. When you're two inches from someone's face you can't just stay where you are. You either have to pull away or close the gap. And right up until I did it, I didn't know what I was going to do.

I had the clearest image of Chris and Annabelle, the veterinarian. He was peeling off her latex gloves, smiling at her, tugging the thin rubber off her fingers, one by one, and Annabelle, the veterinarian, the good-hearted lover of animals, comforter of puppies, curer of cats, smiled back, ready. I saw them in a bathroom, Chris gently removing her white coat, turning on the bathtub faucet. As soon as she came home from work she would need to step into the shower to get rid of the faint smell of antiseptic and animal fear that clung to her. I didn't know a thing about her. In my mind she had brown hair, brown eyes, milky skin. And there was Chris, his naked body next to hers in the shower now, hot water pouring down on both of them, and he wrapped his long arms around her compact, nip-waisted, naked, animal-loving body, and he was free of guilt, guilt-free, and I wanted that, right then, to be free of guilt also; somehow, impossibly, that's what I wanted.

Cal was wiry and muscular, but not the same kind of muscular as a young man, more comforting, attainable: a runner or a bicyclist, possibly, but still, fifty-nine, and probably as happy to spend a Sunday morning lounging around the house drinking coffee as to hop on the bikes and go for a long, vigorous ride.

He was waiting for my answer. Stay or go. A man like Cal would be done with you after so much teetering indecision, all of this too-early exposing of hurts and divided loyalties.
A game,
he would think.
I'm too old for games.

Two weeks before Chris moved out, during a bleak and dirty February cold snap, we sat in the overheated office of Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco, finalizing the terms of our separation. Although I wouldn't admit it, there was still a part of me that thought that this was all an elaborate setup, a desperate long game Chris was playing to try to get me to come around, to fix myself, to change.

I went along with the arrangements. I had even gone with Chris the week before to DomestiCity to help him pick out plates and cups and silverware for his new apartment, as if we were registering for our wedding, only backward.

We strolled companionably through the aisles. A man pushing a cart rushed past us, a little boy wriggling in the child seat. The man was on his phone, his cart stacked high with packages of diapers. “I am hurrying,” he said. “I know, I know. Just wrap her in a towel or something.”

Chris and I looked at each other and laughed. In a way, it felt like we were on a date. It felt like we were on the most romantic, high-stakes date ever. How far were we going to take this? Who was going to give in first?

He picked up a tightly folded fleece blanket and examined it. I looked around at the shelves of linens, plain and patterned, thread counts high and low, the infinite possibilities. I was almost jealous—that he was buying all these new things for his apartment, and I was stuck with our old green towels, linty with memories, our chipped blue cereal bowls, remnants from the ancient civilization of our marriage.

We wandered into the kitchen-goods aisle. I held up a white dinner plate with a border of little yellow flowers and green leaves. “Oh, I love this one,” I said.

Chris stopped, pushed his hand through his light hair, exactly the same way Hannah does, pausing to think more clearly as if they're shaping their thoughts, hand to head. “We'll get through this, Iz,” he said, there in the middle of Kitchen Furnishings. “I think we will. We just need to be in different spaces for a while, a little bit separate, a little air between us.” He was quiet, calm. “And, worst-case scenario, if we can't…if we don't…we'll already have our own places.”

I ignored him and continued filling his cart with water glasses and dishcloths and napkins. “You'll need this,” I said, tossing a huge roll of paper towels into the cart.
And this, and this, and this.
It was unbelievable, a lark. Someone else's life.

But the evidence, like so many rolls of paper towels, was piling up around me. Chris signed the lease on the apartment. He called some friends, X-ed out moving day on the calendar. On that Monday in Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco's office, thirteen days before the move, I was finally, just barely, starting to believe it. But even then it still seemed more like a weird and painful part of our marriage—as if moving out were a precursor to moving back in, a thing we would reminisce about, years from now, with a kind of exhausted pride: it would be something we had survived.

Dr. Grieco was youngish, pretty, with olive skin and straight, reddish-brown hair and serious black glasses that were constantly slipping down her nose. She was vulpine, a little pointy faced and sharp, but this didn't take away from her attractiveness. She wore no makeup other than red lipstick, and I was pretty sure she was a little bit in love with Chris. She was always saying things like “You two must have been friends before you started dating. Surely, Chris, you chose Isabel from a cast of available characters” and “Chris, how do you deal with the inevitable attentions of other women?” And to me: “I can see that it's hard for you, Isabel, to be the less…outgoing half of the couple.”

“I feel like she's always angry at me,” Chris said to Dr. Grieco. She jotted something down on her yellow pad and nodded encouragement.
Handsome man,
I imagined her writing,
articulating feelings!
His voice was infuriatingly measured and deliberate. He turned to me. “There's so much darkness in you, Iz. I don't know. I didn't see it before. Was it always there? Maybe we only worked as a couple when things were easy,” he went on. “It started with the miscarriages, and then…well, we just couldn't get through this. Josie died, and I tried to be there for you, but you pushed me away so hard….” He paused and rubbed his hands over his face like a much-older man. “We were supposed to weather the storms together, but we couldn't…You're not who I thought you were.”

Josie's death had torn off my skin, had exposed me, my muscles, my veins, my pounding, aching heart. So maybe I looked a little different these days, a little bloodier. But this was me. It always had been.

The dry heat in Dr. Grieco's office gave me the strange sense that I was outside my body, drifting somewhere a few feet away.

“Good, Chris!” Dr. Grieco said. She gazed at him tenderly.
Horrible woman,
I thought. My eyes fluttered closed, then snapped open. “Sometimes,” she said, “in a marriage, it becomes clear that the couple you were when you first fell in love is not the couple you are today.” She clipped her pen to her yellow pad and set them on her lap. “And the question is, do you come together and grow, as this new couple?” She held her hands together. “Or do you allow yourselves to move apart from each other?” She moved her hands apart to demonstrate, as if she were hosting an educational show for preschoolers.

I half expected Chris to raise his hand and yell,
Oo, I know, I know!
Move apart!

“I get it,” he said, “that moving out is drastic. But maybe sometimes you have to amputate the limb to save the body.”

Was I the limb, or the body? I heard a soft, growly noise, and realized it was coming from deep in my throat.

“Chris is moving out of the house,” Dr. Grieco said, pushing her glasses up. Her nose was like a child's drawing of a nose, a small triangle in the middle of her face. No wonder her glasses wouldn't stay up. She pressed her lips together and looked at me sternly, and I wondered for a second if she could read my mind. “We've already talked about how this might affect Hannah,” she said.

Hannah. That very morning she had stormed out of the bathroom, a human apocalypse, waving her toothbrush and screaming at me. “I need a new one! I need a new one
right now
! Yours was
touching mine
! I'm not using this one. It's
disgusting
!”

Dr. Grieco smoothed her brown skirt over her lap. “But it's also very important that you both understand what this means,” she went on. “That you are stepping away from each other in a big way. But distance can also give us perspective.”

I tilted my head at her. I felt muffled and gauzy, but at the same time hyperaware: the scritch of her pen on paper, the careful way she modulated her naturally high, reedy voice to make it sound lower, more serious. The hum of the old-fashioned electric clock on her wall. Chris's deep breaths.
This is the moment our marriage ended,
I thought, as if I were both present in this moment and also looking back on it from far off in the future. But then again, we were still connected, alive. Maybe that was the best you could say for any marriage. So who knew?

“The good news is,” I said, “now I can finally embrace that decorating theme you hate. Nevada brothel.”

There was a long moment of silence. “I don't hate it,” Chris said, finally. “I just find the blinking red lights distracting.”

Dr. Grieco nodded and furrowed her brow at the same time. “It's good that you're still able to find humor in this difficult situation. Mmm. Not everyone can.”

Hell, we'd been joking about it for months.
You can have that ugly lamp if you move out. Please, please take those curtains. You can have Hannah! Ha-ha-ha.
It was the pinprick of light in our darkness. It was the trip to the circus the day before the world ended. It was another reason it had taken me so long to believe this.

Dr. Grieco smiled a vague, approving smile. She had no doubt done this before, ushered two people peaceably toward the finish line. She was good at it: calm, repetitive, reassuring. She would go home tonight, open up a bag of salad, turn on PBS, and not give us another thought. She fixed her gaze on me, then Chris, and then on her watch, in a practiced choreography.

“Looks like our time is up!” I said, before she had the chance to say it herself. I stood, seized by the desire to upend her expectations. Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco didn't know squat about distance or perspective. She didn't know anything about us. I turned to Chris. “Do you want to go get some dinner?”

He waited a beat, then smiled at me the way he used to, like I could surprise him, and not just in a crappy way. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

The night before he moved out, I lay in bed and extended my right arm toward the middle of the mattress, feeling for him. He was asleep, rolled up into a ball on the edge of the mattress, like a potato bug. Against logic, we were still sleeping in the same bed. We had been so gentle with each other in the days since our appointment with Dr. Grieco, solicitous and hushed, like two very respectful roommates, one of whom was about to die.
There's no script for this,
he said to me more than once, as we surprised each other with kindness.
We're making our own rules.

He stretched in his sleep and moved toward me. His leg brushed against mine. I could see him in the annoying glow of the streetlight right outside our window, the one that never allowed our room to go completely dark, even through the blinds. His fine, messy hair; his light eyelashes; his handsome features. He especially resembled Hannah in his sleep, all the tight worries of the day loosened from him, although never completely gone. His pale, familiar face.