Today Will Be Different (11 page)

This was ridiculous. I called Joe’s cell.

He picked up after one ring. “Hey, babe.”

“Joe.” My calm voice belied my heart, which had broken loose in my chest. “Where are you?”

“At the office. Why?”

Yow. I realized I wasn’t dreading a scene, I was itching for one. I was ready to jack this party up to eleven and start breaking some plates. The last thing I could have fathomed was that I’d be lied to with such calm, clarity, and conviction. (C-words! They’re everywhere today!) I’d like to say such a thing had never happened to me, but I knew sickeningly well it had, eight years before, at the hands of my sister, Ivy. It’s the last impression I have of her, the cool betrayal. But now Joe? If there was one thing in this world I thought I could count on, it was that Joe was no liar. But here he was, lying.

Yo-Yo pawed at my lap. I’d stopped scratching his head.

“Just thought I’d check in.” I matched Joe’s nonchalance and raised him a bored sigh.

“All’s well?” he asked.

“‘I myself am hell, nobody’s here, only skunks,’” I said. “You know how it is.”

“Do I ever,” he said.

“I had to pick up Timby at school. It’s a long story involving cheaply made clothing, Bangladeshi slaves, and an antagonist with the last name Veal.”

This was better than a scene! It was so exotic, so uncharted; it was forging a new pathway, the two of us, liars. I actually felt closer to Joe in a kinky, thrilling way. Lying! The middle-aged sex?

“I’ll fill you in tonight,” I said.

“I’m stuck at a thing,” he said. “I might be late.”

For years I’d been cataloging traits of Joe’s that annoyed me, things I’d be relieved to have out of my life should he ever decide to leave me. The Gratitude List, I called it.

1. When I get out of the shower and ask Joe to hand me a towel, he invariably hands me a damp one.

2. He has never once
offered
to walk Yo-Yo. He’ll walk Yo-Yo, but only after making me play the harridan.

3. When we go out to restaurants, he puts leftover dinner rolls in his socks and brings them home so they won’t go to waste.

4. Said dinner rolls get placed on his bedside table until he notices them a week later, at which point he hands me the wheat stones and asks me to “use them in something.” (Thus the frequency of bread pudding. No wonder poor Timby is a chunkster.)

5. Every time we go to a movie and it starts twenty minutes late because of the previews, Joe goes nuts, showing me his watch and informing me and everyone else in the theater what time the movie was scheduled to begin.

6. When we run a fan to cool down a room, he insists it point into the room, not out, which just seems wrong.

7. He puts sriracha on everything I make. Even waffles.

My Gratitude List was self-protection. I started composing it the morning after Joe and I first said “I love you,” at Dojo on St. Mark’s Place. Bob Marley’s
Legend
was playing in the background. (This was New York in the ’90s; when
wasn’t
Legend
playing in the background?)

Joe was due at the hospital at 5:30 a.m. He’d showered and dressed quietly enough. But then he sat at the end of my bed, on my feet (!), and put on his shoes. Just so you don’t take me for a complete scorekeeping bitch (which I am, but there’s better evidence), Joe freely admits he’s “essentially selfish.” It’s the single piece of insight he received the one time he went to a shrink. (Me, on the other hand, I’ve been to nine shrinks in twenty years and I’m still like, “Wait… what?”) This selfishness, according to Joe’s miracle shrink, was a response to being one of seven children. Every time a box of Quisp or Quake was unpacked from the grocery bag, kids descended on it in a feeding frenzy. Joe shared a room with three brothers. Control of the remote, a private place to read
Playboy,
everything a cage match to the death. The fault, of course, lay with the Catholic Church, which encourages lower-class families to reproduce like rodents and build up the Church’s ranks, blah-blah.

Another item for the Gratitude List: no more Joe railing against religion.

In fact, that dinner at Dojo, it wasn’t Rasta Bob singing “I wanna love you, every day and every night” that inspired Joe to declare the three words that sealed our fate; it was the following discussion of the New Testament:

Joe: It’s doggerel, aggrandizing a moody egomaniac written by men who believed heaven was a hundred feet above their heads. Literally. So when Christ ascended, He didn’t go higher than a seven-story building.

Me: Who cares?

Joe: The hours I wasted listening to that contradictory claptrap! The things I could have done with that time! I could have learned another language. Or leathercraft.

Me: I was brought up Catholic too, you know. When I was seven, they were teaching us about the loaves and the fishes. I raised my hand and said, “That couldn’t really happen.” Sister Bridget, not happy, responded, “Faith requires the mind of a child.” I said, “But I am a child.” She replied, “A
younger
child.” I thought,
What a load of malarkey,
and never looked back.

Joe: So you just turned atheist? Wasn’t it a struggle?

Me: “Let’s not and say we did” is my attitude.

Joe: I love you.

Me [I knew it was a blurt that didn’t count. But still, you gotta jump on these things.]: I love you too, Joe.

I’d officially fallen in love the week before, in the Adirondacks, and was just waiting for him to say it first. Violet Parry, the creator of
Looper Wash,
had rented a lake house and invited the animators and their significant others for a bonding weekend. (I’d only just met Joe, so new work friends + new guy = doubly scary.) It was July 4th. Rumor had it if we hiked to the ridge we could watch the fireworks from the town on the other side. Only after evening fell and we were getting ready to go did we discover that none of the cabin’s dozen flashlights worked. We groused and resigned ourselves to a boozy night on the porch. Joe didn’t come outside. I found him alone at the kitchen counter. He’d disassembled the flashlights and laid them out like surgical instruments. He’d swapped bulbs, scrubbed off crusted battery ooze, and was folding tinfoil into small squares. So peacefully absorbed, so competent, so dear. (That was the moment.) I’m not kidding, within thirty minutes Joe had ten of those flashlights working. As we headed up the forest path, Violet pointed to Joe and mouthed,
Keep him.

Had I lost him? Might there be someone else?

Yo-Yo’s eyes were closed and his face was raised to the sun. Come to think of it, he
was
pretty useless. Thanks a lot, Joe. You left me for another woman and turned me against my dog. If Jerry Garcia were alive, he could sing a song about it.

The fisherman helped the tattooed chef load the squid into an ice chest. I caught them looking at me. Had they been talking about me? I gave them a nod. They carried on with their business.

I revisited my Gratitude List. Oh, another one! Joe reads in bed long after I go to sleep. No amount of passive-aggressive tossing and turning on my part, nor looking at the clock, nor dramatically putting a pillow over my head will make him turn off the light. When he finally does, he’ll sometimes rest his book on me. And these aren’t slim volumes of poetry. They’re Winston Churchill biographies, and Winston Churchill lived a very full life.

The van door slammed shut. The fisherman was gone. The chef came around the side. Our eyes caught. I held his gaze. He held mine. It’s not that I wanted to get anything going with this guy, but it was too weird…

And then he was walking toward me with an intrigued half smile.

I don’t put my hair in a clip for one day and this happens? A hot chef, knowing he’s got a squid in the back of his van, boldly crosses a parking lot to start up a conversation with a middle-aged woman?

This brave new world could not have come at a better time.

“I have to ask,” he said.

“I have to answer.”

“What kind of dog is this?”

I was as desirable as a hedge. That’s what happens when you lose your sex drive. I can put on Belgian dresses, wear my hair down, and flirt garishly, but when it came to real currency, sexual currency, I had none.

This morning when Joe said of Yo-Yo, “I know what he’s getting out of
us,
I just don’t know what we’re getting out of
him,
” he wasn’t only talking about the dog.

I offered the chef the leash.

“He’s a mutt,” I said. “Want him?”

“Wow,” he said. “No, but thanks. He sure is cute!”

With that, my Gentleman Caller disappeared into the ether.

It’s not like I don’t come with my own grab bag of flaws. Although Joe is far too superior to catalog his grievances toward me, they might include:

1. Once I ate a bagel on the toilet.

2. I use too much floss.

3. I floss in bed.

4. I take the dog into the shower with me to wash him.

5. I take my first bite of popcorn at the movies by touching my tongue to the top of the popcorn and eating what sticks. But Joe always says he doesn’t want popcorn because it’s too salty, so it’s mine and can’t I eat it the way I want?

6. I toss Milk Duds into the popcorn.

7. Actually, I bite the Milk Duds into four pieces and spit them back into the popcorn so they’re smaller, giving me a better popcorn-to-Milk-Dud ratio. Yes, they’re covered in saliva, but it’s my saliva. Though I can see how, to someone reaching into the popcorn he said he wasn’t going to eat, it could be an issue.

Joe wouldn’t say this because he’s a gentleman, but I will: I’m looking worse by the day. I’m all jowly. My back is dry. I have a bush the size of a dinner plate. My core strength is nonexistent. Menopause means your metabolism skids to a stop and you lose 30 percent of your muscle mass. In other words, the self-discipline to watch my weight, which I never had to begin with, I now need more of. Really, I’m hanging by a thread. Sure, Joe had spent breakfast with his face down on the table but at least he was still in the same room with me.

Yo-Yo, bored with the hot sun, let out a snorty yawn.

Come on, Gratitude List, work your magic! I haven’t nursed you all these years for nothing!
The whole idea was when Joe finally hit the eject button,
I’d
feel free too. Kind of like that first shower after getting my hair chopped off, or those first steps in a new pair of cushiony running shoes, or seeing the world through new, stronger prescription lenses…

Could this be happening? Could the elixir I’d been squirreling away for decades have lost its fizz?

Was it me? Was it Joe? Was it the passage of time? Was I too tired to care? Earlier this year, I’d told a mother at school I’d been married fifteen years. She asked, “What’s the secret to a long marriage?” I thought for a second, then answered, “Staying married.”

Was it happiness I’d found in my long marriage? Or capitulation? Or is that all happiness is, capitulation?

The story of our marriage was in frames all over our apartment: Joe and I riding to the Emmys in the back of a limo. Me surprising Joe during a medical conference in Chicago and having someone take our picture in front of Cy Twombly’s peonies. (Moments later, Joe asked me to marry him in front of the Bean with a ring he’d grabbed at the museum gift shop.) Our wedding in Violet Parry’s backyard in Martha’s Vineyard. Giving birth to Timby at home on Thanksgiving Day, the TV on in the background, the cast of
Sunday in the Park with George
performing during the Macy’s parade.
Sunday, by the blue, purple, yellow, red water
. Joe opening the Wallace Surgery Center. Timby’s first day of kindergarten.

But standing there in the weak October sun, a different story of our marriage presented itself. It was as if all those years, Joe and I had been followed by a photographer snapping pictures of us unawares…

Joe and me reading quietly in bed, Timby playing Legos at our feet.

Me looking out the window, seeing Joe and Timby below, walking home from the Science Center.

Me standing on the Galer Street lawn in the drizzle, early for pickup.

Yo-Yo snoring in the living room, so loud none of us could sleep.

The three of us sitting on the curb outside Portage Bay waiting for them to call our name for brunch.

That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments between. At the time, I hadn’t pegged them as being particularly happy. But now, looking back at those phantom snapshots, I’m struck by my calm, my ease, the evident comfort with my life.

I’m happy in retrospect.

Oh, Joe, take me back and I promise I’ll make love to you twice a week and never eat a bagel on the toilet again. I’ll appreciate the quiet moments and—

Hey! Could it be? Alonzo! Walking on a pedestrian overpass spanning Elliott Avenue.

I watched him go down the stairs and head into the Costco parking lot.

This was perfect. I needed to apologize for calling him “my poet.”

Alonzo had changed into jeans and a red polo shirt, but he was unmistakable from afar with his sturdy frame and regal carriage.

“Let’s go!” I said to Yo-Yo, who jumped so vigorously out of his sleep I feared we both might tear muscles.

Cars were few on the edge of the Costco parking lot. Yo-Yo’s friskiness toggled to despair as I tied him to an empty shopping-cart rack and sliced the air with my index finger. “You. Stay.”

Alonzo’s mop top bobbed over the parked cars in the distance and stopped at a rack filled with pony packs of marigolds. Alonzo took in the unremarkable sight and threw his head back with a jolly laugh. Poets. I needed to be more like them.

Alonzo spotted something on the ground—I couldn’t see what—and leaned over to pick it up. He then disappeared into the shadowy maw of Costco.

This was my Costco, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t lost Timby in here more than once, so I’d perfected the art of finding moving targets. My secret? To canvass the place like I was drawing that house with the
X
through it without lifting my pencil.