Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

  My life is already improving. Though Glenn doesn’t live in New York anymore, we still talk and email daily. I’m finishing a first draft of Bird and hoping to show it to her soon. And after years of living alone in between failed relationships, enviously staring at couples walking around the Village on the weekends, I am finally one of them. I gaze up at Gary in his dark blue peacoat with his big shoulders and his giant green eyes and am just about to tell him how happy I am, how great this is—how being with him on the street in my neighborhood after a movie feels like a tiny miracle—when he suddenly stops moving.

  “I can’t go in there.”

  I think he’s kidding. We’re standing right in front of the door of the restaurant—people are rushing around us to get inside where the windows are steamed with heat. But when he steps away from the door, disengages from my arm, and looks up and down the street, his eyes are wild. He is terrified. I feel like I’m with a stranger.

  “If you make me go in there, I’ll die.”

  “I’m not going to make you do anything.” The street telescopes, goes quiet. He looks like a cornered animal. I stand perfectly still, trying not to make any sudden moves.

  He tells me he’s serious. He’s not kidding. That he can’t take it anymore.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, what’s happening, what the “it” is. I wonder for a split second if I should call someone, someone who deals with this kind of thing, but I don’t know who deals with this kind of thing because I don’t know what this thing is.

  He takes a few deep breaths, then shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I hate Sundays.” He is pacing now, back and forth, then in circles around me.

  I blink, trying to piece things together. I know about his father’s drinking, the volatility of his home life during and after his parents’ divorce, the hypervigilance and anxiety that came from that kind of uncertain and traumatic childhood—and I’m convinced that our relationship will be enough to save him. That together we’ll get past his childhood, that with someone to take care of him and look out for him, he will survive and thrive. I’m sure of it. My naïveté is staggering in retrospect, but at the time, I believe my plan will work.

  Back then it is easy to comfort him, to distract him from himself, to make things better. When he is calm I take his arm again and lead him away from the restaurant and back up University Place toward my building—into the lobby, past the doorman, and up in the small creaky elevator, into my apartment. After an hour in bed, he is better. Back to normal. He gets up and gets dressed, opens the refrigerator, then closes it. “Where should we go? I’m starving!” he says. Like nothing happened.

  But something did happen. Because now I’m the one who can’t move. I’d felt so good after the movie, but taking care of Gary took everything out of me. It’s like we’ve traded places. Glenn was right when she said that he’s too complicated—maybe I am making a mistake, maybe saving him means risking getting pulled under myself. But it already feels like it’s too late. I already feel like I’m in too deep. He already needs me. How can I leave?

  Helping the drowning is noble work, the most noble journey, but it can cost you almost everything. I think of Teddy, our one true joy. How can I say I would have chosen differently when Gary has given me this beautiful boy, this good life? How can I be anything other than blocked when I feel so conflicted and confused?

  Leaving Early

  It’s only nine o’clock, but it feels like a million hours go by as I wait for Gary to come back up from dinner. I haven’t been high since college, and while I didn’t like the feeling then, I realize I actually hate it now. Whatever was in that joint is nothing like the harmless low-tech pot we used to smoke. I’m wired and exhausted, anxious and paralyzed, almost like I’m tripping. I have no idea when Andy left the room and what we talked about before she did. I’m trying to get my hands to work on my phone—trying to text the People Puppets to make sure everything is okay back home—that Teddy has left his room at least once and that Phoebe has worn the dog for at least an hour—but while I’m fumbling I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve lost track of time. All I sense is that at some point this evening I had a desperate urge to draw.

  The next thing I know, Gary is back. He’s standing over me, asking me if I’m okay.

  “Maybe it’s all the crayons and markers we used today, but I’ve been dying to get creative.” I’m talking either superfast or superslow. Am I actually talking or are the words just in my head?

  Gary stares at me, then sniffs. “It smells like pot and Sharpies in here,” I think he says. He looks down and then so do I: there’s my open tote bag on the floor, most of its contents spilled out onto the rug. Fragments of memory are coming back to me: I remember digging around in that bag for the handful of pens I’d grabbed before leaving the house yesterday morning. I smirk at the possibility that I had a delayed reaction: after producing nothing in the seminar all day, I may have had a burst of creativity tonight.

  I’m groggy now, and headachy, but vaguely aware that something isn’t right. Gary is moving in slow motion around the room, his mouth open in horror. He’s pointing at the photos on the walls, and at some of the framed pictures on the bookshelves. His lips are moving and words are probably coming out but I don’t hear anything until finally he grabs me by the shoulders and yells:

  “Jesus, Judy. What did you do?”

  What did I do? Apparently, in his absence, and under the influence of whatever kind of cannabis was in Gregory’s desk drawer, I took my supply of Sharpie pens and marked up Sari Epstein’s happy-couple photos: big Dalí-mustaches on the glass over some of the faces; devil horns on others. And then there’s the reprint of the New York Times Style section piece on Creativity Gurus where I drew arrows pointing to Sari’s head and then wrote, in big block letters, THE FOREHEAD. Next to that are several caption bubbles filled with I HAVE A “CREATIVE” IDEA: GET SOME BANGS! and OR: HOW ABOUT A SIDE-PART?

  More of my memory is coming back to me: I now remember making those mustache flourishes and writing those caption bubbles; the glee that my old book signing and illustrating pens were no longer going to waste and were finally being repurposed—punishing someone who isn’t even a writer because she had a framed print of a famous Norman Mailer quotation on her bookshelf: WRITER’S BLOCK IS ONLY A FAILURE OF THE EGO.

  A failure of the ego. Her ego is so ridiculously huge that it’s eclipsed the fact that her only true creative talent is marketing creativity retreats. Which didn’t even work for me.

  The more I blink awake, the more the rage comes back to me. Gary is pointing at a big poster-size blowup of the two of them, Sari and Gregory, from the back, running down a beach holding hands. I’ve scrawled THIS IS SO UNFAIR on the glass at the top of the photo, with a flurry of at least ten angry arrows pointing at them. He sighs, rolls his eyes. “Jesus, Judy. Please don’t tell me you’re jealous of them.”

  “I am, but it’s not what you think.” I’m jealous of their ease. I’m jealous of his mental health, of her physical health. “Why do you have to struggle every single day and he doesn’t? Why does Sari get to live when Glenn’s going to die?” It’s the first time I’ve said this out loud, and it only makes me feel worse, not better. “Why do some people get to be healthy and others don’t? It’s not fair.” The words come out of me in a low growl, and then in the deep howl of a wounded animal. “It’s not fair.”

  Gary exhales and his shoulders slump. The day has gutted him, too, but somehow he is still standing. I cry until I can’t anymore.

  “I want to go home,” I whisper, wiping my nose. But I know that’s not possible. There’s still another day of the seminar, and the minute Sari sees what I’ve done, she’ll post about it on social media. I’m paralyzed with shame and fear.

  Gary looks down at all our stuff, then at the clock on the desk—it’s almost 10:00 P.M.—and then out the window. It’s pitch-black out, and he can just make out the car under a big white rising moon. He picks up all of our b
ags at once and, with his free hand, lifts me by the elbow. It seems we’re leaving early.

  * * *

  We tiptoe down the stairs and edge around the kitchen door. Andy is clearing the table and Gregory and Sari are drinking wine and talking in hushed tones—their practice of “checking in” with each other after students have left for the night, both of them glowing from the activity of creativity, from the apparent joy they take in the community of artists and writers they’ve built; in the people who come and go from their house struggling to express themselves. All I feel is loneliness—every cell in my body and brain is empty and devoid of what’s supposed to connect me to the rest of the world—and to Gary—and I am full of a strange new grief, that of a nonjoiner who suddenly sees what they’ve been missing out on all these years: community, connection, the quiet comfort of others.

  But there is no time. With the stealth movements of a scene from a Bourne movie, Gary signals for me to follow him down a few more stairs, into the “car-barn,” otherwise known as a garage. There are the three cars—the SUV that Sari drove to the cheese store, the BMW Gary refused to drive, and the white Prius Gregory drove earlier. He takes a set of keys off a nail on the wall and pops open the Prius’s trunk, then loads our bags in. He motions for me to get into the car, and then he does, and, with a press of the “start” button, the dashboard lights up. Gary turns off the interior lights and the headlights and backs out of the garage without a sound. In our perfect battery-operated getaway vehicle we float silently down the lawn all the way to the Volvo.

  With everything transferred into our car, and the keys left in the ignition of the Prius, Gary leans in through the driver’s door and puts the Volvo into neutral, runs to the back of the wagon and pushes it down the road past Sari’s house. Once we’re in the clear, Gary gets behind the wheel and shifts the car into drive. At the end of Sari’s road, he guns it toward the highway. I enter our destination—Home—into his phone, then put it on the holder on the dashboard. In seconds it lights up with our mapped route. We’ll get back just after midnight.

  * * *

  In the dark silence between us I remember another similarly dramatic night-escape—years ago, before Teddy was born, when we visited a college friend of mine in Maine. Clara had invited me countless times to see the beach house that had been in her family for generations, and one summer weekend a year after I’d met Gary, I finally agree. I print out her directions and pack up the car. I promise him that it will be fun.

  Gary only reluctantly agrees to go—he prefers the impersonal feel of hotels to the awkward closeness of staying with friends—travel in general and being in situations he can’t control, like being someone’s houseguest, makes him extremely anxious—but as we get off the highway north of Portland and follow the coastal roads into town and toward a huge shingled house on a craggy hill, he suddenly perks up.

  “See?” I say. “And you didn’t want to go.”

  But then we pull into the driveway and arrive at the back of the house, which is a dump. Gary parks on a burned mound of dry grass next to two dead station wagons and several feral cats. The cats glare at us, and then Gary glares at me. “We’re not staying. You know I can’t handle this kind of thing. The unknown, the unclean, the unsafe.”

  Clara, plain and preppy in flat sandals and a faded Lilly Pulitzer–style skort, comes running out to greet us before we can plot the details of an escape. She takes us through the back of the house—from the kitchen that hasn’t been touched since the avocado-green-and-brown-appliance-seventies, to a grand foyer where flies enter in through a sagging screen door, to an upstairs guest room. Inside the bedroom with sea foam–green walls, Gary’s eyes fixate on the bed itself: a mattress on the floor, a short stack of stained pancake-thin pillows waiting for pillowcases; the buzzing of bees and more flies outside in the dead summer heat.

  Clara adjusts the window fan leaning up against a broken screen like a scrappy nurse improving the angle of a bed or a splinted limb. “If you just angle it like this,” she says, almost pushing it out the window, “you can get a nice cross breeze. And it keeps the mosquitoes from coming in. Who needs air-conditioning?”

  “Not me!” Gary says theatrically, hitting his head on the swaying chain hanging from a bare lightbulb on the ceiling. He grits his teeth then digs his nails deep into the soft flesh of my palm. “We’re leaving,” he mouths.

  “I know,” I mouth back.

  It only gets worse when Clara leaves us alone. “Oh look, Judy!” Gary shrieks. “A litter box! In our bedroom!” He covers his eyes with both hands. “We’re not staying. I can’t sleep here. I won’t sleep here. It’s hot. There are mosquitoes. And—”

  “I get it, Gary. Don’t panic. I’ll think of something.”

  We hug, then laugh hysterically into each other’s necks, trying to snuff out Gary’s rising anxiety, which lasts until after dinner, when we go back to our room and pretend to go to sleep for the night. Instead, in the moonlight, with the bleating of crickets in the background, Gary and I, much like we did tonight, tai chi our way out of the guest room, down the stairs, and out the kitchen door to the car. If Gary hadn’t knocked over a trash can while I left a note on the kitchen table, thanking Clara for her hospitality and apologizing for our hasty departure, we would have made a clean getaway. Instead, we peel out of the driveway while all the lights in the house go on. Seconds later, driving on a road that traces the ocean like a finger, we stop at the first beach parking lot we pass.

  “What did you say in the note?” Gary asks, breathless, tearing at my clothes.

  “That you forgot your little Claus von Bülow bag of insulin,” I say, tearing at his.

  “Diabetes! Brilliant!”

  * * *

  Tonight, in the dark of this autumn evening, we drive under another giant moon, but we will not pull off the road after this escape the way we did then; we will not tear each other’s clothes off. I watch Gary drive, study his face lit by the yellowy lights of the dashboard and briefly by the occasional oncoming car for clues for what to say.

  “What’s wrong with us?” I whisper. I’m not sure if Gary doesn’t answer because he hasn’t heard me or because he doesn’t know how to answer. “We’re not like other people. We’re always escaping. We’re always fleeing in the middle of the night.”

  “No we’re not like other people. And maybe you’d be better off if you finally accepted that.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I don’t want to be different.”

  “But you are different, Judy. You have a different kind of marriage than most people have. And so do I. Maybe we both wish we didn’t—maybe we both wish we had a ‘normal’ marriage, whatever that is—but we don’t, and that’s how it is. That’s our reality. The longer you fight it, the worse it will be. For you. For me. And for Teddy.” He shakes his head. “I get it. I get that Sorry and her stupid husband have it easier than we do, or seem to anyway. I get that it sucks about Glenn—there is no justice when it comes to who lives and who dies—but you still could have used this weekend to jump-start your work. But maybe me being there ruined it for you, so you just shut down and didn’t even try.”

  “You didn’t ruin it for me.”

  “Sometimes I wish I’d married someone else, too. And the weird thing is, I’m not even that unhappy, Judy. Even though we don’t fuck anymore, and even though we sleep in separate rooms and have this weird arrangement that’s kind of a fake marriage and kind of a very real marriage, I still love you. And I probably always will, no matter how things eventually end up.”

  I turn my head and rest my forehead on the cold glass of my window.

  “You’ve got Teddy, and the dog, and me. You may wish you had more than that, but that’s not bad.”

  I don’t want more than that. I’ve never wanted more than that. I’ve just wanted things to be easier. Is that so wrong?

  “No one cares how weird your life is, Judy. Or all the ways you think it’s failed you,” Gary says. “Your
mother’s gone. No one sees the bird on your head except you.”

  Part Three

  Bracing for Change

  Michael Wasserman

  Trying to distract myself from the emotional hangover of our disastrous trip to Vermont, I’m at Costco a few days later, fondling a twenty-count bag of small avocados, while Teddy is off in the video game aisle. I’m hoping to find even one avocado that is soft enough to eat tonight, or tomorrow night, or maybe this month, which I know probably isn’t going to happen, since finding an avocado that’s ripe when you want to eat it is nearly impossible. Everything in life is about timing, about patience, about having faith in the future, but I’ve never believed in any of that. All the cigarettes I smoked before meeting Gary because I was convinced I’d never meet anyone and thus would never have anything to live for; all the times I’ve tried to get back to my work—the writing and the drawing—and failed. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe I’m still not ready. Maybe instead of blaming myself for what happened at Sari Epstein’s I should accept the fact that I’m pushing myself to do something I don’t actually want to do anymore. Maybe I should just move on.

  Moving on (“Is ‘moving on’ like ‘giving up’ but with a better publicist?” “When accepting failure is a Good Thing”) is what I’m thinking about when I think I see Michael Wasserman from Hebrew school looking at a jumbo pack of tomatoes. Michael Wasserman, who I’d had a secret crush on all those years ago because of his slim chinos and thick brown hair and perfect teeth and always-white Jack Purcell sneakers, but who had never liked me back. At least I didn’t think he did. Was it possible he’d liked me, too? Probably not, especially since he’d started dating Janie Levy, who also had perfect teeth, during our bar/bat mitzvah year, and to my knowledge, they had never broken up. But now that I’m technically separated, I force myself to question all my default negative thoughts—especially that he could never have liked me because of what I did to him all those years ago by accident.