Together Apart: Change is Never Easy

by Maxxwell, Lexi

  Firstly, she’d love the gesture: her man bringing her flowers.

  Secondly, although Sam would love the gesture, she’d mock him and pretend she thought it was cheesy (and so typical of Zach).

  And thirdly, seeing this particular bouquet would cause a well of pleasant nostalgia to bubble inside her, as it had in him. Zach had bought her a bundle of antiqued hydrangea and Leonidas roses from Pretty in Pink, her favorite shop — the one she’d found their first Sunday in Memphis, then had clung to like a shipwreck’s floating debris. Despite Sam’s protests, they’d both been nervous, out of sorts and a little sad that first week after leaving Portland. Sam had always loved flowers; her father had owned a store when she was younger. Like her father’s store (Fleur de Lys) Pretty in Pink was a bucket shop, designed for shoppers who wanted to buy flowers for themselves, rather than the gift business of weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays that helped most flower shops survive. Sam had gone to Pretty in Pink each day in search of comfort and memory, grateful that the city had a doorway into her past. But as Memphis grew familiar, Sam went less and less. She hadn’t been in months, so seeing something from Pretty in Pink right now, on the cusp of their new start, would be a singular delight.

  But there was a final thing, too, and that was the box in the bag hanging from Zach’s other hand.

  He’d detoured after picking up the flowers, heading to the bank to deposit a check. The route from Pretty in Pink to the bank took him past a Godiva chocolatier he’d never noticed before. Zach almost laughed when he saw it; its presence serendipitous like a cosmic joke — not at Zach’s expense so much as his benefit. It was the universe winking, dropping him a sign that everything would, indeed, be all right.

  There was a Godiva in Portland, near the pizza place where they’d ordered their first stay-in pizza as a dating couple. Sam had pointed it out right away, telling Zach how Godiva reminded her of Gram, because her grandmother had always loved cherry cordials. Zach said that all old ladies liked cherry cordials. Not like Gram, Sam had told him. She was an addict.

  So, they’d stopped in and caught the clerk a few seconds before closing, and Zach had bought chocolates despite his paltry income earned working in the student affairs office because a good date bought his girl chocolates. Sam had, of course, said this was ridiculous. Chocolatiers attached romance to chocolate like diamond companies pinned loved and devotion to sparkly rocks.

  Sam had told him that Gram had never, ever let her have any of her precious cherry cordials despite their intoxicating scent. Zach said this was a crime. So, they bought a small box, plus one of assorted truffles, the two together costing Zach a small fortune.

  Their relationship was too new for those first chocolates to lubricate anything terribly sexy, but she’d smelled the flowers and tried the chocolates and had smiled plenty. Zach had lain beside her on the couch, trailing a finger up and down her arm and looking up at her like a lost puppy.

  They’d been so nervous back then. It was strange to think on it, knowing each other as they did now. He hadn’t asked for her number the night they had met, him puffing a joint outside that obnoxious party and her declining to join him, both laughing so hard that they cried. He’d been too cool, too standoffish — too fucking chicken shit, to tell the truth — to do so. Zach played detective to find her, the mysterious girl with the big, blue eyes who’d shown up at the party. He’d manufactured a way to see her again (although looking back, their friends may have set them up) and only then had he started to call her. She had liked him. It was obvious. But still he had started each phone call with a psych-up routine, and had ended each feeling both giddy and despondent, sure that he’d fucked up.

  On that first real stay-home date, they’d eaten pizza. She’d sniffed at her flowers, and they’d popped cherry cordials while watching the first half of Breakfast at Tiffany’s because they both knew people (separately) who swore they should see it. Zach didn’t see what the big deal was, but he stared at the screen, smiling the whole time. Eventually, Sam had said, “This movie is boring” and Zach, relieved, had turned it off. They watched Three’s Company on cable after that, and the pizza vanished except for a single slice. The cordials disappeared entirely, after splitting the final contested one. Zach had, of course, insisted she take it. But Sam, of course, insisted on splitting. She’d done it with a knife. That’s how new they were; biting the chocolate in half seemed too familiar.

  Since that day, cherry cordials — an old lady’s chocolate, and not something that showed up in their lives unless Zach put them there — were a trigger to remember that first night, and those first times spent together. In the first few years of their marriage, he’d occasionally picked them up as a surprise. Each time they would sit together and tell stories from that first night. The couch in Zach’s apartment had been an embarrassment, with a spring protruding from the middle, so they couldn’t sit close unless they were very careful. Why they’d never done the surgery necessary to snip the spring, Zach didn’t know, but eventually they’d put a rag over the pointy spot and learned to lie around it. They had shared many makeout sessions on that couch, then later on a better couch in the questionable apartment they’d moved into after tying the knot. Their neighbors in that apartment were a rather loudly amorous (and constantly drunk) couple on one side and what sounded like an opium den on the other, but it had been home.

  Whenever they were in need of remembrance, Zach had bought a box of chocolates and they’d gone on their own drug trips, traveling back to the time when touching Sam’s breast through her shirt was something Zach somehow thought he might get slapped for. When the mere thought of touching Sam’s breast under her shirt had made his neck prickle with taboo. Even after he’d licked the cordial filling from Sam’s nipples a few times (he thought it was hot; she thought it ridiculous), eating the chocolates took them both to a time when they were strangers to one another — shy, innocent strangers who still had so many firsts ahead of them.

  It had been a few years since they last had cherry cordials. At first, it had seemed like a cause — as if not picking up the chocolates from time to time was one of the “little things” that fell out of favor and nursed distance between them. But at some point their lack of indulgence flip-flopped and became an effect — something they no longer did because of the distance. Cherry cordials slipped into a kind of protective capsule in Zach’s mind, and seemingly in Sam’s. They were sealed off, set on a red satin pillow under a showcase spotlight, displayed in the most special case in their museum of early memories, sacred, not to be touched with their current filthy, distant hands. If Zach had picked up a box during the past year, it wouldn’t have felt like a tip of the hat to their past. It would have felt profane. As if they were sullying their most cherished and special of symbols, like using a childhood teddy bear to wax the car. The sweet, innocent days of cherry cordials and Breakfast at Tiffany’s were gone, and as the saying went, you could never go home again.

  Things had changed, and Zach knew he could safely open that old vault and release the best memories from inside. He could feel it, and knew Sam would feel it, too. Things had been rough between them in the six months before and since the move, but none of their fights were cruel. They bloomed from the stupidest things: Zach would leave a full water glass on top of the TV; Sam would lay one of Zach’s books open on its face instead of closing it delicately with a bookmark. Sometimes, they fought about money, but it was always about Zach’s lack of worry versus Sam’s constant anxiety, never about how to earn or spend it. Nothing said was ever vicious, and barely unkind. They had simply grown apart, and both knew it. But that was good, in a way, because it meant that no bridges had been crossed, and certainly none had been burned. They weren’t like two neighbors fighting over the placement of a fence. They were two neighbors who used to invite one another over for dinners on the lawn, but had fallen from the habit. There was, in other words, nothing for Zach and Sam to repair, per se. They simply had to look deep inside themsel
ves and rediscover that desire to invite the other in.

  Zach thought about the baby.

  He didn’t want to be a parody of himself. He didn’t want them, as a couple, to make the same mistakes as everyone else. Watching some couples was like watching the stupid kids in a slasher movie, heading into the dark basement where the killer waited. Why didn’t those kids get out of the house and run? And why, when faced with an unsalvageable marriage, didn’t both parties get out while they could? They seized on dumb reasons to stay together, twisting the killer’s knife without realizing they were. Babies were one of those. It was almost a cliché: A baby will bring us together.

  But this felt different. It was different. This baby wasn’t glue. This baby wasn’t duct tape over a crack in a basement foundation. This baby, Zach felt certain, was the simple reminder they needed. The baby was God (or whoever; he hadn’t decided and neither had his wife) tapping him on the shoulder:

  This is what you should be paying attention to.

  Not his stupid graphic design job. Not his flagging artistic ability, which was surely caused by a lack of ambition — which, in turn, was caused by the fact that he felt more like a graphic designer these days than a groundbreaking artist. Yes, he’d been living rather neatly inside the box. But so what? There was the woman he loved to consider, and the baby they were having together.

  Zach walked down the sidewalk, feeling himself again for perhaps the first time since coming to Memphis. He kept his head high rather than down and focused. He looked up to inhale the blue sky. Early on, Sam used to tell him that his head was perpetually in the clouds. Not so recently. Zach had been a responsible boy, his feet on the ground and eyes on the prize. But as he made his way back home with the flowers in one hand and the box of cherry cordials in the other, he let his head float like it once did.

  Zach dropped his sense of responsibility to reality. He didn’t need to see things as they were; reality would get along just fine while he was floating through the clouds, feeling stupid and optimistic and inspired. And as Zach walked and felt high, as he thought about the reminder in Sam’s belly and how exciting their future together would be, he started to feel inspired again. It wasn’t much — a memory of brushstrokes here, a palate of mental colors there — but it was something. Since they’d moved, Zach felt like art was something he had to do, like jogging. You jogged to stay fit, and you did it whenever you could shoehorn it in because it was something you had to swallow, like a pill. His art used to feel like play. He used to vanish inside his Portland studio, emerging an unknowable eon later with paint on his hands or clay bits somehow in his hair. He’d get cuts when he worked with metal and never knew how he’d gotten them. He’d look at finished pieces and barely recall their assembly. He could remember the music playing when he’d worked in a particular area of any given canvas, but was still surprised by what had occurred there. It wasn’t like that lately. Zach missed the creative fugue, where things happened as if of on their own. But right now, if he didn’t have flowers and the long, long missed chocolates to deliver, Zach thought he would be in his studio. You had to strike while the iron was hot — make hay when the sun shone, as it were. He hadn’t felt this way in a while. It was a good sign. Maybe great.

  Life often burned slow. Zach knew that. He also knew that by contrast, he wanted things to happen quickly. He was patient in his own way (more patient than Sam; she could have and maybe should have been a great writer, but chose journalism because success took forever), but it was hard for him not to think in terms of this day, this week, this month. Yet even now, as his head lifted and he pulled back to see the bigger picture, he realized that what they’d both been recently feeling was nothing more than a bump in the road. It felt terrible while it was happening, but what would it be a year from now? Ten years from now? If he were to look back on this past year on the day of his son or daughter’s high school graduation, what would he think? He’d be 44 or so, married to Sam for nearly a quarter of a century.

  From that vantage, how ridiculously insignificant would this year of uncertainty seem? How stupid would he feel for doubting, after an additional 18 years of better days?

  He felt the weight of the chocolates in his hand. Over the past week — ever since Sam had told him the news — things had started to heal. Only, it wasn’t precisely healing, since there hadn’t been damage. Things had begun to realign. Sam looked at him the way she used to, with big, sparkling eyes and a white smile, set off by her perpetually tan skin. That look had always made Zach feel so good. It said that while she didn’t entirely understand her husband and his alien artist’s temperament, she was both mystified by and proud of him. And he, in turn, felt himself looking back at Sam in the way he used to, the way he’d forgotten. She was the yin to his yang. Or was it the other way around? Yang was fire, focus, masculine. Yin was soft, yielding, feminine. Zach had the fire, yet he was the one who yielded. He was the man, but Sam was focused. And even that felt playful, because she had started to mock him again in the sunny past week. He was the girl in their relationship, she had always said so. Only, she hadn’t said it much recently, because the tension was too tight for joking. It was ironic that when they were closer, they jabbed each other more.

  A smile lit his face. Zach nodded at people as he passed, like a man in a cheery movie montage. The people didn’t respond, and seemed wary. It was fine — he had his whole life ahead of him. They both did.

  Zach climbed the steps, traversed the hallway, and put his hand on the doorknob. He was about to pull his key from his pocket, but then he had an idea.

  He raised his fist and knocked on the door.

  Nobody answered.

  But Zach knew she was in there; Sam had run out on some errands hours before but her car was downstairs so she had to be back.

  He knocked again, bouquet raised. Then, realizing an opportunity, he dug the box of chocolates from his bag, held the box in his hand, and shoved the empty bag into his pocket. He adjusted his stance as, finally, he heard footsteps approaching and turned himself into the perfect image of a suitor come calling. Just as he was six years before.

  He watched the peephole, saw it darken. Then Sam’s voice said, “Why are you knocking?”

  “I’ve come to court you, my lady,” Zach said, grinning.

  “OK.”

  “Aren’t you going to let me in?” The grin grew larger.

  “What, did you forget to take your key?”

  “I … Sam, no. Just open the door.”

  He heard a sigh. The doorknob rattled, and the door cracked an inch. He pushed in, using his elbows because his hands were full, and was greeted by the sight of Sam’s back. She was carrying a laundry basket. Without looking back, she went to the laundry closet and began feeding clothes into the front-loading stack.

  “I brought you something,” he said, approaching her.

  “OK, hang on.” More clothes went into the washer.

  “Check it out. This is a visual.”

  She was bent at the waist, fist full of shirts. With one hand on the washing machine door, Sam rolled her head sideways, looked at him, and said, “Nice.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, I thought you’d be more pleased.” He could hear the change in his voice and fought it. This was about them first, her second. Zach, as an individual, came last in this particular flowers-and-chocolates scenario. But he couldn’t help it. This was thoughtful; he wanted the appreciation and expected delight.

  “Let me finish this laundry, OK?” Sam looked at him again, then returned to the clothes basket.

  Zach stood in the middle of the living room, feeling like an idiot. She hadn’t failed to see. And seeing, she couldn’t possibly have failed to interpret. The bouquet was bright and large; the box of chocolates was a shiny gold. His items were clear in intention like dynamite, especially given how they had sidestepped the cherry cordials over the past year. Him bringing them back was a supreme act of v
ulnerability — for both of them. Those memories exposed some of their most tender parts. He might as well be displaying a portrait of them making love for the first time. And yet, despite what she saw, Sam wasn’t reacting.

  With supreme effort, Zach fought an almost suffocating swelling of hurt. This wasn’t about him. And whatever was wrong, that wasn’t about him, either.

  Feeling like one of history’s heroes, Zach calmly walked into the open kitchen, pulled a vase from under the counter, and filled it halfway with water. He unwrapped the flowers, dropped them in the vase’s open mouth, then fluffed them, attempting with his florally retarded eye to make them pretty. Despite his artistic ability, Zach couldn’t arrange flowers half as well as Sam. But he was doing it to kill time, to pretend that her 30 seconds of indifference hadn’t just eviscerated him. The cordials were on the table in the nook, sitting atop a pile of bills. He had to stay where he was, arranging flowers, because the next move had to be Sam’s. Seeing the precious gold box of memories sitting in such an undignified manner atop the stack of mundane paperwork hurt his heart. Their proper place was between Sam and Zach on the bed, while they laughed and felt the endorphins of happier days flood their minds.

  Zach heard Sam close the washer and start it. He heard her close the laundry closet’s accordion door. He waited for her to come over and embrace him (and thank me, he thought with more rancor than was probably appropriate), instead he heard her walk down the hall and return the laundry basket to the bedroom.

  It did make sense to return the laundry basket before coming over to greet him, since if she left it in the hallway, one of them was likely to trip over it. Sure, it was maybe a bit ungrateful to not walk over, wrap her arms around him, or note the kindness of his gesture, but Zach supposed he could understand Sam’s desire to finish the laundry — and, of course, after she’d finished, to return the laundry basket.

  He’d been arranging the flowers for far longer than necessary. He poked them more, then pushed the vase toward the wide counter’s middle. Looking at it made Zach vaguely sad, and he was sort of wishing he hadn’t stopped to buy them.