Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

  It’s been a few days since my conversation with Grace about our tuition issue when I stand in the doorway and watch Gary pull from a giant purple bong. I used to come down here late at night to throw in a load or two of laundry, but after a few times of catching the muted but unmistakable moan and groan of online porn coming from behind the makeshift curtain room divider, it seemed safer and less awkward to use the machine during the day. With the curtain open now, the gurgling of the bong is deafening. Usually he uses a sleek little black vaping inhaler, but every now and then, when he comes home early enough, he likes to go old-school with smoke and dirty water and bubbles. He finally notices me, covering my ears melodramatically with my hands, and grins.

  “Want some?” he croak-talks without exhaling, angling the bong in my direction.

  “No thanks.” Gary smokes entirely too much pot these days, even though it’s the medically prescribed kind, formulated especially for his kind of debilitating anxiety, with all the THC removed—something I’d even managed to work into a few of my top-read Well/er posts. (“Is the ‘new pot’ for you?” “Why cannabis beats Klonopin for anxiety.” “If just seeing the word cannabis makes you anxious, keep reading.” “Yes, pot sommelier is a thing, and you need one.”) But, as usual, I don’t say anything. Why open myself up to the conversation that would certainly follow—the one that would surely include my role in the fact that our marriage is essentially over even if we can’t afford to live separately like normal people? Why would I want to go there when I can just pretend to ignore the fact that he is smoking himself into oblivion? Isn’t that what marriage is all about? Avoiding terrible arguments and self-examination that could expose your own complicity in the breakdown of your union?

  But there has always been Teddy to consider, his happiness, the preservation and protection of what’s left of his childhood, and so we came up with a practical affordable solution that seems to be working for us: an in-house separation masquerading as separate sleeping arrangements due to intense snoring. Separated but still living together. And every six months or so we assuage our guilt for failing each other by going through the motions of seeing a new couples therapist on the off chance that we can change or, at the very least, improve on our imperfect solution. It’s also fun. We get to tweak an unsuspecting therapist who has no idea that we know we’re beyond help. It is performance art, cheaper and more fun than a dinner-and-movie date night.

  I watch the smoke pour out of his mouth—so much smoke that I quickly close the sling over the dog’s head so she won’t get a contact high. “Every time you ask me I say no. So why do you keep asking?”

  “Because maybe one day you’ll say yes.” Gary closes his eyes, throws his head back. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops—at all.”

  I sit down in the guest chair. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson is in the middle of the train table, an elastic band around it. I pick it up and run my fingers over the title. “You gave this to me after our first date. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” he says, with a slow shake of his head. “God, how pretentious.”

  “It wasn’t pretentious. It was sweet.” I touch the elastic band until it makes a sad twang. “We’d left that bookstore reading early. Of course.”

  “Because it was so insufferable.”

  “And because we love leaving early.” Especially when we feel justified in leaving early. That night: an independent bookstore on the Upper West Side when we still lived in New York, a few months after we’d started dating. A pompous windbag-author was reading from a biography of Henry James, my favorite writer in college—I’d loved how seemingly tiny moments were often his character’s biggest turning points—droning from a makeshift podium amid folding chairs full of tweedy types with corduroy pants and public television tote bags.

  Stuck in a middle row, holding hands, we’d exchanged glances during his insufferable presentation—Ready. Set. Go.—then, without words, we’d fled, like shoplifters. Outside on the sidewalk, excited by our tiny theft of time and freedom, we’d kissed, long and hard, then finished with a faux-theatrical dip. We were That Couple, full of passion and snark and the private loathing of others.

  “I’m so glad we left,” he’d whispered into my hair. It was summer, late evening, all the light still left in the sky turning pink and purple and orange as dusk fell.

  “Me, too.”

  “I hate readings.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Let’s never go to another one again.”

  I’d nodded. How fun it was to make rules—future rules—rules about what we would and wouldn’t do—together. After spending most of my life feeling utterly alone in the world, surviving the cycle of dating and heartbreak that repeated itself over and over again throughout my twenties and early thirties, I now felt part of a secret world: all it took was this one person for us to create a whole new parallel universe. I never wanted to leave it.

  “Unless it’s a reading for your book,” he said. “Then I’ll go.”

  “How do you know there will be a book?” I said. I was still waiting to hear from Glenn, my older editor-colleague-friend at Black Bear Books, who had recently been transferred to our publisher’s flagship office in Boston when we went through a sudden company-wide downsizing. Things were slower there than in New York, she had told me, but I was still convinced that in the end the news I’d get would be bad.

  “Because of course there will be a book,” he’d said without a trace of doubt. “Glenn will love it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know Glenn.” Gary had been an office temp, on and off, at Black Bear for years after college while he was still trying to get his music career off the ground. “She loves you and she’s going to love your book. It’ll all work out.”

  I didn’t understand his faith in the future, his relentless hopefulness. It didn’t make sense to me: how people believed in the positive when the negative was so much more likely. My family had never uttered that phrase—that things would work out—because, quite simply, they didn’t believe it. They knew from almost direct experience in fact—my parents’ parents were all Holocaust survivors—that often things didn’t work out and that sometimes the worst happened instead. Faith in the future was not part of my DNA, and trusting Gary felt like telling myself to stare at the horizon while on choppy water: if I kept my eyes trained on him, maybe it would all be okay.

  I’d smiled and let him pull me toward him again. “See, that’s what I love about you,” he said. “How hope-challenged you are.”

  I remember that moment, staring at him, frozen. It was the first time he’d used the word love, and I wasn’t sure whether to acknowledge it, to ask if he meant love-love or if he simply uttered it in the gleeful afterglow of having been released from inexorable boredom. Like so many other times, before and after, I would let a moment pass without asking an important question. Better not to know than to get the wrong answer. Instead I just asked this:

  “Is that a hardcover book in your pants or are you just glad to see me?”

  He’d laughed, then reached into his jacket and handed me a book of poems. “I was so bored I forgot to give it to you.”

  As I looked at the book jacket and the pages in disbelief—I was thirty-five years old and no man had ever given me a book of poetry until that night—he touched a wisp of hair that had come loose from my ponytail. “And just so you know, when it’s your reading, I’ll go and I’ll stay through the whole thing.”

  “Well, you’ll have to. Because I’ll have to stay. Because I’ll be the one reading.”

  “That’s true. Besides: leaving early alone isn’t nearly as fun as leaving early together.”

  I’d looked at the book again and then leaned into him, putting my forehead, then my ear, on his chest. I remember hearing his heart beating underneath his T-shirt, a sound I was still getting used to, a language I only pa
rtially understood. There may or may not have been tears in my eyes when I’d whispered, “Someone’s getting lucky tonight.”

  But I was the one who’d gotten lucky: I’d gotten an answer without having to actually ask a question. And I’d gotten someone loyal and loving beyond measure.

  That was a lifetime ago. Now, a few hours before our teenager will be home from school, the book is a relic, a souvenir of a time and place I sometimes don’t believe actually existed. I flick the elastic a few times with my finger and wince at its flat tuneless sound. “What’s with the rubber band?” I say, looking at the book’s spine to see if it has somehow split and would explain the need for something to keep it together.

  “Some of the pages came loose. Because I read it so much.” He takes the book from me, puts it on his lap, pets it. A little too lovingly, I think, until he throws his head back and sighs loudly. “God, what happened to us? We had such promise. Now we can’t even afford to separate like normal people.” He stares somewhere off into the middle distance. “Maybe I should just go back to law school already.”

  I look at the book in his lap, then at the dog in the sling in my lap. Our marriage, our finances, our life are in ruins. I sigh. “It’s time.”

  Gary sits up. “I’m not quitting pot. I can’t. I’m not ready. Nothing, not even Klonopin, touches the anxiety like weed.”

  “I know. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  It takes him a second or two to understand, but when he does he shakes his head. “Oh, no. Not again.”

  “We have to. We have to find another therapist.”

  “Do we?”

  “Don’t we?” I, too, would rather die than go back into couples counseling, but if we’re going to continue this separated-but-living-together-under-the-same-roof arrangement, we’re going to have to be able to talk about things like Gary’s pot smoking, my wearing the dog, how to deal with seeing other people—not that I can imagine having any interest whatsoever in ever dating again—I haven’t had a normal libido since before Teddy was born—but he does.

  “We went through three therapists last year,” Gary says. “With all the money we wasted on them I could have moved out already.”

  The thought of dredging everything up again makes me want to slide off the chair onto the floor and stay there. But then we’d still be here, in this same place, this awful purgatory, and I’d feel even deader than I do now.

  And then there’s Teddy. Whether what we’re doing and how we’re doing it is having an effect on him.

  I stare at the train table, lean forward to touch my fingers to the scratches and grooves where he used to run his trains back and forth on the wood, before he learned how to snap the tracks together and build loops with curves and straightaways and tunnels and bridges. “Remember when he would stand and play at this table for hours?”

  Gary looks at me, then at the lighter in his hand, then at the table. Of course he remembers. It’s as if Teddy is right there in front of us, with his tiny pants and minihoodie-sweatshirt, clutching a train car in each hand and pointing at us to watch.

  Couples Therapist Number Four

  We sit on a long couch facing Deirdre Nussbaum, MSW, whose name we got using a new therapist-rating-and-locator app I’d written about for Well/er (“If Open Table and Yelp and Headspace had a baby, 50Minutes would be it”). Sporting boxy cotton separates and giant wearable-art earrings, she smiles and takes our new patient clipboards from us, leans in as she scans them, then looks up at us soulfully.

  “How can I help?”

  I clear my throat, wait for words to come, but none do. They never do. For all my alleged ease with them, I am more often than not at a total loss for coherent sentences, stammering out half syllables, especially in stressful situations like this. I scan the walls, then the bookshelves, tilting my head slightly to read the titles: The Dance of Anger. Un-Coupling. Children of Divorce. There’s a Bird on Your Head . . .

  “Judy?”

  My lips finally move, but the words don’t feel like mine. “We’re trying to negotiate our separation. In terms of our son.”

  Deirdre kicks off her boiled-wool clogs to sit crisscross-applesauce in her midcentury leather shrink-chair. Then she points to the sling. “Is that your son?”

  I laugh, too loudly at first, flattered to be considered young enough to be wearing a baby, then uncomfortably at the weirdness of the truth. “No! No. That’s the dog.”

  Gary sighs. “She has anxiety issues.”

  “Wait,” Deirdre says, looking at us over red half-glasses. “Who has anxiety issues: Judy or the dog?”

  Gary, the one with the actual anxiety problem, sits up a little straighter, raises an eyebrow at me. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all, the eyebrow says. He’s wanted to discuss Sling-Dog Millionaire for a while, but until now the time has never been right.

  “She was a rescue,” I lie, the way I always do, too ashamed to admit that we got the dog from an actual pet store, which I like to think means we actually did rescue her, and which conveniently makes it less of a lie. “She needs constant reassurance that she’s safe and loved.”

  “Judy was also a rescue,” Gary adds until I shoot him an annoyed look. “Just kidding. Judy doesn’t need reassurance. She knows she isn’t safe or loved. Nothing you can tell her can convince her otherwise.” He shrugs. “It’s how she was raised. Literally without hope.” He then mentions my grandparents.

  Deirdre shifts in her chair. “We can come back to the dog, and to Judy’s childhood, but let’s focus first on what brought you here.” She looks down at our clipboards but can’t seem to make sense of much of what we’ve written. Except for one phrase that I wrote in block letters, which Number Four now points to and reads out loud:

  “It says ‘Separation anxiety.’”

  Even though it isn’t funny, why we’re there, we smirk at the joke. The pun of my inability to separate from the dog and our inability to separate from the marriage—and Gary’s actual acute clinical anxiety—is suddenly extremely funny. Every time we see a new therapist, our effort is a spectacular failure. We’ve never found one with a sense of humor, and Deirdre’s obvious lack of one now on the clipboard test proves that today will be no exception.

  We will leave early.

  “So you need to work out custody and visitation?” she asks.

  “Not exactly,” I say. “We’re having some financial challenges, so we’re still living in the same house. In separate rooms.”

  Deirdre nods, scribbling furiously. “Kind of like double-nesting—when divorced parents each get an apartment and come back and forth to the family home instead of uprooting the kids.”

  “What Judy isn’t explicitly saying is that we’re broke so we can’t afford to split up. What Judy also isn’t saying is that one of the reasons we separated is because we never had sex anymore.”

  I roll my eyes. “I wouldn’t say ‘never.’ I’d say rarely.”

  He rolls his eyes. “I’d say extremely rarely.” He looks at Deirdre for help. “Judy used to be really into it, but then she wasn’t anymore. It’s like one day that part of her just shut down.”

  He isn’t wrong. Even the Chinese acupuncturist I started seeing when I still thought it was a temporary shutdown lingered ominously after taking my pulses. “You closed for business down there,” she had said, slicing her hand through the air with absolute certainty. “Closed. For. Business.” But the needles didn’t help.

  “I’m just stressed-out! And exhausted!”

  “Everyone’s stressed-out and exhausted!”

  I think about the past decade, see myself trapped in a snow globe’s bubble with Gary’s debilitating anxiety, which has radically curtailed his social life, and ours; the death of both my parents within two years of each other; the intense pressure of being the primary breadwinner—all of it falling down, in a silent snow, around me. The strains on our marriage turned our relationship into a friendship—or, more precisely, a family: full of closene
ss and kindness and deep love while short-circuiting the sexual connection. Didn’t Freud write about this? And how many articles have I read that say this is the new normal, not to mention my own anecdotal research over the years proving that almost every woman I have ever known since Teddy’s preschool days confessed to me the same lack of interest, the same toll of stress and petty grievances and the cruel diminishing of hormones. Aren’t I just one in a long line of hourglasses turned over, on the other side of time? Aren’t I kind of normal?

  “Sadly, this is actually quite common for many many couples, Gary, for a whole host of reasons,” Deirdre slips in soothingly before Gary makes clear in a loud voice that he doesn’t care about other couples right now.

  I hug the dog and scan the office for a white noise machine, the mainstay in every therapist’s office, hoping no one in any of the neighboring offices will overhear us. But Deirdre’s machine is especially small and ancient-looking, huffing and puffing and working overtime in a corner; we need one the size of a basement dehumidifier here to drown us out. “Now that we’re officially technically separated,” I tell Deirdre, “I’ve told him he’s free to do what he wants.” I turn to Gary and fling my hands out over the sling. “Go have sex!”

  “But I wanted to have it with you!”

  “But it just didn’t work out that way!”

  “But why not? I still don’t understand!”

  Deirdre leans forward. “Yes, why not, Judy?”

  I stare down at the dog, listen to the hum of the white noise machine. I have no other answer except for this: “Because I’m dead inside. And I don’t know if I’ll ever feel not dead.”

  “Well then, Gary,” Deirdre offers, “let’s think about your options.”