Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

  “That’s superbrave of you, Gary,” Sari says. “What will you be sharing with us?”

  “I wrote a song. Well, part of a song.”

  Sari nods, impressed, then puts her hands together under her chin, bows her head slightly, and whispers, “Namaste.” I roll my eyes at Gary—What does namaste have to do with creating and sharing something? (I would later learn, and write about for Well/er, that “ICYMI: namaste directly translates to ‘The divine in me bows to the divine in you.’”) But he is struggling to stand up in the tight space on the floor without losing his balance. The women from his table who are still sitting around him give him a little boosting push on his arm and back, then laugh—but not unkindly. “Go, Gary!” one says, and the others repeat, “Go, Gary!”

  Gary—taller than almost everyone anyway—now towers over the room because he’s the only one standing. Looking beyond Sari, he points to a ukulele on a shelf. “May I borrow that?”

  “Of course,” Sari says. “Anything for art!”

  We all watch as he steps around pillows and people to reach it and tune it before sitting back down to play. But after strumming a few goofy chords, he stops.

  “I think I’m feeling kind of shy,” he whispers, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. “It’s been a really long time since I wrote or performed anything. Years, actually. My anxiety has robbed me of what I love for a very long time.”

  “Sharing one’s art is a courageous act. We are all here to support you, fellow brave-warrior-soul.” She bows her head again. “We are so grateful to receive the gift of your sharing.”

  Every time Sari says something ridiculous, which is essentially every time she opens her mouth, I want to catch Gary’s eye—want him to validate the extremely high bullshit quotient going on here, the way we normally do at home. This is not who we are. We are not joiners. We are not suckers for this kind of emotional group-think manipulation. We don’t belong here. But something is happening. Gary is absorbing whatever it is that the group is offering him—beyond just the “empathic solidarity of the artist’s spirit,” as described on Sari’s website. They are supporting him, shoring him up, seeing him for who he is. He closes his eyes, then picks up the ukulele again.

  I’m sad with you.

  You’re sad with me.

  You’re distant, and quiet, until you see the dog.

  Suddenly you coo, you kiss, you’ve found your bliss.

  The way you are with her is how you used to be with us.

  Why do you love the dog more than me?

  I’ll be frank: I’ll tell you why I pout and what this is all about:

  I feel left out.

  How sad it is to have to admit

  That I’m deeply jealous of our pet!

  Again, I’m blindsided. It never occurred to me that Gary would be jealous of the dog, though it’s completely understandable, since I show the dog way more love and affection than I show him. I’m also mortified, but at least I left the dog at home so no one knows about the sling. I barely breathe as I glance around the room—the women convulsing in laughter, delighted by his song. Several of them nod, recognizing themselves in his lyrics.

  “I spoon with our dog every night and my husband gets so pissed!” one of the women says, before falling over facedown into a pillow, her poncho spread out all around her. Another covers her mouth guiltily: “My husband calls our dog ‘the boyfriend.’”

  Gary rests the ukulele in his lap. He seems relieved by the positive reception to his song, but I can tell that he’s also surprised and confused by the lightheartedness of their reaction: here he was, baring his soul about the deep pain he feels because of the loneliness of our relationship—how he’s competing with, and losing to, a dog, which his wife now wears. But the pathos of what he wanted to communicate got lost in translation, stripped away in favor of the adorableness of his performance and the fact that so many women can relate to the topic of preferring dogs to husbands. He wanted that pain to be acknowledged, seen, felt. Instead, it’s being eclipsed by relatable marriage-humor.

  Gary stares at me as the compliments flow around him. I know he wants more than anything for me to acknowledge what he just put into words—everyone else may have missed the point, but he knows I didn’t. He waits for me to throw him some kind of bone—a word of understanding, a promise of improvement, a sign of love. Immobilized by the public awkwardness of the situation, and truly impressed by his impromptu performance, I give him two thumbs-up and a big smile. “Great job!”

  It’s not enough. My response is yet another disappointment. He turns away from me and, instead, turns back to his group. I get a funny feeling that we have crossed a line—as if something has shifted and he knows, finally, that who I once was is gone for good, that I’m never coming back.

  After lunch, when we return to the afternoon session, I can only come up with a half-finished paragraph and a stick-figure sketch about the torture of writer’s block. When it’s my turn to share, I clear my throat, but nothing comes out.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Yes you can,” Sari says. “Just relax.”

  I glance over at Gary for some encouragement, but he looks away, refusing to meet my eye. He’s done. I’m on my own. I stare at my pad again, but still nothing. “No. I really can’t.”

  “Okay, Judy.” Sari turns to the woman next to me. “Go ahead, Ann, brave-warrior-soul.”

  And just like that, I’m off the hook.

  * * *

  We’re back in our room, getting ready to go to the big group dinner to celebrate the completion of the first day of our Noble Journey. Gary’s pawing through his small overnight bag, trying to decide which sweater to change into, when I tell him that I think Sari’s methods are a crock. “When I said I couldn’t read my thing, she should have pushed me. Instead, she took the easy way out and just went on to the next person.”

  He stares at me. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Actually, I’m not.”

  “It’s not Sari’s job to push you, Judy. It’s your job to push yourself.”

  “No, actually, I’m here because I paid her to push me. If I could push myself to write I’d have stayed home!” He shakes his head, which only makes me dig in more. “Look, just because you were the star of the day with your song doesn’t mean that her approach works across the board. Not everyone can just perform on cue.”

  “Judy. I haven’t ‘performed on cue’ for almost ten years. You know what a big deal that was for me. You know how I battle in my head to get through every single day.”

  “I do know,” I say quietly. “And I admire you for it.”

  “I don’t want your admiration. I want something else.”

  I sit down on the bed. I don’t know what that means and I’m really not ready to find out. The idea of leaving the room is suddenly more than I can handle and I tell Gary that I’m going to skip the dinner. “Just tell Sari that I don’t feel well. Which is actually the truth.”

  “Good. I’ll go alone. Which will make me feel less alone than if you were there but not really there with me.”

  * * *

  It’s quiet after Gary leaves. Too quiet. I look around the room and realize Sari was right—it’s a beautiful space: high ceilings, big windows with the same kitchen view of rolling fields; linen couches and overstuffed armchairs and walls of bookshelves. For the first time since we got here, I touch things—big glass paperweights, the topstitching on throw pillows, the frames of happy-couple family photographs—and I’m sad suddenly, missing Teddy, and the dog, and Glenn. I’m just about to open a desk drawer out of habit—I’ve always been a compulsive snoop, curious to know the mundane things about people—what they eat, what they read, how they arrange their clothes and their closets, the kind of toothpaste and floss they use—my fingers are looped around a heavy brass drawer-pull when Andy appears in the doorway with a dinner tray.

  “Looking for something?” she says eyeing me, before explaining the soup. “Sari said
your husband said you didn’t feel well.”

  I know that if her hands were free she would have pumped air quotes around that entire sentence. I drop my hand from the drawer-pull. “Just chocolate!” I lie.

  “You won’t find any in this house. Skin and Bones wouldn’t eat chocolate unless her pills were covered in it.”

  We have a nickname. I can’t wait to tell Gary. When we start speaking to each other again.

  Andy puts the tray on the desk, then bends down and slowly slides the bottom left-hand drawer open. She reaches in, behind what looks like a stack of envelopes, and pulls out a fat white joint. “Is this what you were looking for?” I don’t answer, so she sniffs the rolled joint, lights it, takes a long slow drag, then hands it to me. After all the times I’ve said no to Gary, I take it from her without hesitation. Why not? It’s been a shitty day. I take a second drag when that’s offered, too, but refuse a third.

  “So tell me about these people, Andy. Sari and Gregory.” I lean back against the desk, and close my eyes. Something is definitely happening to my brain already.

  “You don’t need me to tell you what your eyes can plainly see.”

  I inhale, then nod. “They seem like such phonies. Such narcissists. Peddling confidence and snake oil and big dreams to the disenfranchised and downtrodden.”

  Andy raises an eyebrow. “Don’t get crazy.”

  “Sorry. I mean, the creatively disenfranchised and downtrodden.”

  She stares at me and shrugs. “All I know is that they’re in the business of telling people what they want to hear and these people are hungry for it. They eat it up.”

  “I hate myself for being here.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  I tell her that I came because I’m desperate, that I’m stuck, that I have writer’s block. I tell her that I know it sounds like a First World Problem except that it’s how I used to earn a living, for my family. I try to guess Andy’s age—she’s probably twenty-five, or twenty-eight, definitely under thirty. She probably has no idea what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t have at that age. “This was a last-ditch effort to restart my career, but I barely wrote anything today, despite a million different prompts that seemed to work for everyone else. Including my husband, who was the star of the day. And he wasn’t even supposed to be here!”

  Andy says that I sound pissed. And I guess I am. I’d wanted some time to myself, to clear my head. But there we were, attached at the hip, as always. It’s such a shitty, ungenerous thought to have so I tell myself it’s the pot talking.

  “Some couples like that togetherness-thing,” she says. “You must like it, on some level, if you ended up here together.” I shrug, and then she shrugs, and then she says she’s not interested in any of that straight-cis-married-shit. “I’m single. By choice.”

  “You’re smart.”

  “I know.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “I do.”

  “You should stay that way.”

  “I will.”

  * * *

  In minutes, after she leaves, I feel awful for being so unkind about Gary’s breakthrough, especially since I only want him to do well, to thrive, to conquer his anxiety. I just wish that we both had it easier. I often wonder, as I do right now, if I’d known how much Gary and his anxiety might eclipse me—that being in his orbit might pull me away from my work, my thoughts, my own private world, the dissociated place in my head I’d always gone to that made it possible for me to think and work—whether I still would have married him. I think back often to the beginning, to when Gary and I first met, as if there is an answer I will find there. If I’d known how hard things would be now, would I have made the same choice? Would he? Doesn’t every married person ask themselves this question?

  Sometimes, when I’m with Glenn, waiting for a doctor to see her or for a drip to start, and I tell her the latest with Gary—a new anxiety trigger or symptom, the possibility of an untried therapy, even more pot—she shakes her head.

  “I told you,” she says. “But you didn’t listen. And now you’re stuck.”

  She means “stuck” in the best possible way, though. She means: stuck together, like birds of a feather. She means: “You’re not just married. You’re family now. Because that’s what happens.”

  That is what’s happened. It’s why we stay. I look away from whatever nurse or needle is closing in on her, out a window if there is one, at the patterns on floor and ceiling tiles, and think back to the early days, when I first met Gary. He’s temping in the publicity and marketing departments of Black Bear Books, coming and going for weeks at a time, during our busy periods—opening boxes, packing up Jiffy bags, collating binders for sales meetings, organizing shipments for trade shows. I notice him—who didn’t?—because he’s tall and funny and straight—a unicorn in New York publishing.

  “I love the guy, but no,” Glenn says when I ask about him.

  “I don’t care that he’s still a temp at his age.”

  “I don’t care either. I meant that he’s too complicated.”

  “Everyone still single is ‘too complicated.’ That’s why we’re still single.” I roll my eyes for good measure, but in truth I’m concerned. Glenn’s warning reminds me of the time a friend wanted to fix me up with someone she’d met at a wedding. “You should meet him,” she said, “but he has glasses.” I stared at her. “How big are the glasses?” The friend had cleared her throat. “Very, very big.” Which they were, when I finally met him because I didn’t believe her. I’m not sure I believe Glenn now, either, even though I know I probably should. “How complicated?”

  “He’s divorced. Brief marriage, right after college, no kids, but still. Who needs that? Better to start fresh with a first-timer. Someone with no history of failure.”

  I shrug. It doesn’t feel like a deal breaker to me. In fact, the idea that he was married once means he might marry again. That he can commit. So this is actually good news. “What else.”

  “He used to drink. And there may have even been a few visits to rehab in between temp-stints here. But to be fair, it’s because of his anxiety and the musician lifestyle: you stress about money, whether you’re any good, whether anyone’s going to show up to hear you play, what the reviews will say. And you drink. Self-medication as opposed to simple degenerate behavior. There’s a difference, of course.” She is only half-kidding.

  Addiction doesn’t run in my family and I have never dated an alcoholic. But I’ve seen some on TV and in the movies who have successfully quit, like Paul Newman in The Verdict, and I believe strongly in the power of change. I’m undaunted. “And?”

  “And, he’s Catholic. And you need a Jew. I’ve met your parents. You’re their only child; their parents were survivors. You have one job in life and that is to marry within the tribe and perpetuate your people.”

  That may have been true at one time, but it isn’t true anymore. All they want now is for me to bring home someone decent and kind, someone good-looking, and someone taller than me because they’re of that generation that does not go for a nontraditional differential in height. Gary would fit that bill on all counts.

  “Look,” Glenn says. “I love Gary—you will not find a kinder more hilarious guy on the planet. But, he struggles. Which means you’ll struggle. I just want you to have an easier time than I did.”

  She has been married twice—the first time to an alcoholic she’d met in graduate school who died a drinker long after their divorce—he simply could not stop drinking—and the second time to an editor who died young of Parkinson’s ten years into their marriage. By the time I meet her she is single and living alone, like me. “Both times I thought I could handle it, and both times I underestimated what I was taking on. I’m not saying I regret either husband, but they each took a lot out of me. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had chosen differently.”

  I get it but I don’t get it. I’m still young enough to believe that we don’t choose who t
o love—love chooses us. I’m drawn to Gary’s troubled past, attracted to it even. I want to save him. I’m a giant cliché, but I don’t care. I’m also reading the tea leaves of his past and future differently: that as someone who’s struggled, he’s resilient, a fighter, a survivor. Couldn’t that be the story that will eventually unfold?

  And so against Glenn’s advice, when I run into Gary a year or two after his last temping stint, I say yes when he asks me to go bowling. We meet on a snowy night after Thanksgiving when almost no one is back in the city after the holiday. He teaches me how to bowl with the big balls and big pins, even though he grew up in New England, like me, candlepin bowling, with small balls and tall narrow pins. He stands behind me, almost a whole foot taller, shows me how to put my three fingers into the three holes and swing my arm back and then forward and up. He models it for me, vamping up and down the lane like a pro bowler on TV. He looks ridiculous, but he hits strike after strike, while I throw mostly gutter balls. In between strings we talk about people we used to know at work and we die laughing. We close the place down. With our coats on, heading down the stairs to the street, I congratulate him on his victory.

  “We’re tied. Because you won, too.”

  “What did I win?”

  We are out on the street now, on University Place, and it is cold and dark and quiet. For a few seconds, the only footprints on the sidewalk are ours. He looks up at the sky, takes my hand, and kisses it. “This.”

  Within a month we will practically be living together at my place, a block away from the bowling alley. I will have no regrets. He’ll be nothing but loving, and kind, and honest—dependable and present in ways no previous boyfriend has been before.

  When I call to tell Glenn the news, she laughs through the phone. “I am so happy to be wrong!”

  * * *

  But she is not wrong. He has his first panic attack on what seems like a perfect Sunday afternoon. We’ve seen Harold and Maude at the Cinema Village on Twelfth Street and afterward walk a few blocks down to a diner for an early dinner. It is late December. Dusk had fallen while were inside the theater and Christmas tree lights twinkle in almost every window. I slip my arm inside Gary’s and lean into him. Despite the gloaming, the movie has left me in an unfamiliar state of being: squishy and warm; full of love and hope; open to possibility. If Maude, a Holocaust survivor, can embrace life, then I can embrace it, too.