by Lauren Fox
I ignored him and continued filling his cart with water glasses and dishcloths and napkins. “You’ll need this,” I said, tossing a huge roll of paper towels into the cart. And this, and this, and this. It was unbelievable, a lark. Someone else’s life.
But the evidence, like so many rolls of paper towels, was piling up around me. Chris signed the lease on the apartment. He called some friends, X-ed out moving day on the calendar. On that Monday in Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco’s office, thirteen days before the move, I was finally, just barely, starting to believe it. But even then it still seemed more like a weird and painful part of our marriage—as if moving out were a precursor to moving back in, a thing we would reminisce about, years from now, with a kind of exhausted pride: it would be something we had survived.
Dr. Grieco was youngish, pretty, with olive skin and straight, reddish-brown hair and serious black glasses that were constantly slipping down her nose. She was vulpine, a little pointy faced and sharp, but this didn’t take away from her attractiveness. She wore no makeup other than red lipstick, and I was pretty sure she was a little bit in love with Chris. She was always saying things like “You two must have been friends before you started dating. Surely, Chris, you chose Isabel from a cast of available characters” and “Chris, how do you deal with the inevitable attentions of other women?” And to me: “I can see that it’s hard for you, Isabel, to be the less…outgoing half of the couple.”
“I feel like she’s always angry at me,” Chris said to Dr. Grieco. She jotted something down on her yellow pad and nodded encouragement. Handsome man, I imagined her writing, articulating feelings! His voice was infuriatingly measured and deliberate. He turned to me. “There’s so much darkness in you, Iz. I don’t know. I didn’t see it before. Was it always there? Maybe we only worked as a couple when things were easy,” he went on. “It started with the miscarriages, and then…well, we just couldn’t get through this. Josie died, and I tried to be there for you, but you pushed me away so hard….” He paused and rubbed his hands over his face like a much-older man. “We were supposed to weather the storms together, but we couldn’t…You’re not who I thought you were.”
Josie’s death had torn off my skin, had exposed me, my muscles, my veins, my pounding, aching heart. So maybe I looked a little different these days, a little bloodier. But this was me. It always had been.
The dry heat in Dr. Grieco’s office gave me the strange sense that I was outside my body, drifting somewhere a few feet away.
“Good, Chris!” Dr. Grieco said. She gazed at him tenderly. Horrible woman, I thought. My eyes fluttered closed, then snapped open. “Sometimes,” she said, “in a marriage, it becomes clear that the couple you were when you first fell in love is not the couple you are today.” She clipped her pen to her yellow pad and set them on her lap. “And the question is, do you come together and grow, as this new couple?” She held her hands together. “Or do you allow yourselves to move apart from each other?” She moved her hands apart to demonstrate, as if she were hosting an educational show for preschoolers.
I half expected Chris to raise his hand and yell, Oo, I know, I know! Move apart!
“I get it,” he said, “that moving out is drastic. But maybe sometimes you have to amputate the limb to save the body.”
Was I the limb, or the body? I heard a soft, growly noise, and realized it was coming from deep in my throat.
“Chris is moving out of the house,” Dr. Grieco said, pushing her glasses up. Her nose was like a child’s drawing of a nose, a small triangle in the middle of her face. No wonder her glasses wouldn’t stay up. She pressed her lips together and looked at me sternly, and I wondered for a second if she could read my mind. “We’ve already talked about how this might affect Hannah,” she said.
Hannah. That very morning she had stormed out of the bathroom, a human apocalypse, waving her toothbrush and screaming at me. “I need a new one! I need a new one right now! Yours was touching mine! I’m not using this one. It’s disgusting!”
Dr. Grieco smoothed her brown skirt over her lap. “But it’s also very important that you both understand what this means,” she went on. “That you are stepping away from each other in a big way. But distance can also give us perspective.”
I tilted my head at her. I felt muffled and gauzy, but at the same time hyperaware: the scritch of her pen on paper, the careful way she modulated her naturally high, reedy voice to make it sound lower, more serious. The hum of the old-fashioned electric clock on her wall. Chris’s deep breaths. This is the moment our marriage ended, I thought, as if I were both present in this moment and also looking back on it from far off in the future. But then again, we were still connected, alive. Maybe that was the best you could say for any marriage. So who knew?
“The good news is,” I said, “now I can finally embrace that decorating theme you hate. Nevada brothel.”
There was a long moment of silence. “I don’t hate it,” Chris said, finally. “I just find the blinking red lights distracting.”
Dr. Grieco nodded and furrowed her brow at the same time. “It’s good that you’re still able to find humor in this difficult situation. Mmm. Not everyone can.”
Hell, we’d been joking about it for months. You can have that ugly lamp if you move out. Please, please take those curtains. You can have Hannah! Ha-ha-ha. It was the pinprick of light in our darkness. It was the trip to the circus the day before the world ended. It was another reason it had taken me so long to believe this.
Dr. Grieco smiled a vague, approving smile. She had no doubt done this before, ushered two people peaceably toward the finish line. She was good at it: calm, repetitive, reassuring. She would go home tonight, open up a bag of salad, turn on PBS, and not give us another thought. She fixed her gaze on me, then Chris, and then on her watch, in a practiced choreography.
“Looks like our time is up!” I said, before she had the chance to say it herself. I stood, seized by the desire to upend her expectations. Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco didn’t know squat about distance or perspective. She didn’t know anything about us. I turned to Chris. “Do you want to go get some dinner?”
He waited a beat, then smiled at me the way he used to, like I could surprise him, and not just in a crappy way. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
···
The night before he moved out, I lay in bed and extended my right arm toward the middle of the mattress, feeling for him. He was asleep, rolled up into a ball on the edge of the mattress, like a potato bug. Against logic, we were still sleeping in the same bed. We had been so gentle with each other in the days since our appointment with Dr. Grieco, solicitous and hushed, like two very respectful roommates, one of whom was about to die. There’s no script for this, he said to me more than once, as we surprised each other with kindness. We’re making our own rules.
He stretched in his sleep and moved toward me. His leg brushed against mine. I could see him in the annoying glow of the streetlight right outside our window, the one that never allowed our room to go completely dark, even through the blinds. His fine, messy hair; his light eyelashes; his handsome features. He especially resembled Hannah in his sleep, all the tight worries of the day loosened from him, although never completely gone. His pale, familiar face.
“Why are we doing this?” I whispered, but his breathing was deep and even. Our separation was like a tumbleweed now, rolling along, unstoppable, gathering debris. My heart felt thunderous and shaky. I tried to calm myself, to match my breathing to his, but every time I thought I had the rhythm down, I lost it.
The furnace cycled off and created a kind of unexpected silence, where you didn’t even realize that just seconds ago there had been noise. Chris mumbled something in his sleep and rolled again, his leg moving abruptly away from mine.
···
The morning Chris moved out, the actual morning, was February 14. When he realized what day it was, he sat down on a kitchen chair and covered his face with his hands.
“I’m sorry,�
�� he said quietly, his voice muffled by his fingers. Guilt came off of him like heat; he was radiating it. “It’s Saturday,” he said, which, of course, I knew. “It was the only day the guys could come,” which I also knew. “I didn’t realize.”
“It’s fine,” I said. I was also sitting at the kitchen table, force-feeding myself cornflakes. I swallowed a mushy lump. “It’s actually perfect.”
He moved his hands away from his face, and I saw, before he turned away, that his eyes were wet, his face stricken, and I scooped up another soggy spoonful of my cereal and thought, Good.
The doorbell began ringing a few minutes later. Jack Halloran was first, one of the guys Chris played pick-up basketball with on Sunday mornings. He was a urologist who had cheated on his wife five years ago with a drug rep at a medical conference in Houston, and, although his wife, Michelle, never found out, he lived with his guilt by doting on her with an almost-psychotic focus. Gary Sanchez was next. He had three kids and worked with Chris at the DNR, and he confessed to Chris that although he loved his children, he frequently regretted having them. Then Dave Milkowski, another of Chris’s work buddies, whose extensive history of juvenile shoplifting convictions had been expunged from his record when he turned eighteen. Then Kurt Grunsmeyer, another basketball pal, a forty-one-year-old serial monogamist who referred to all of his ex-girlfriends as “crazy bitches.” Finally Henry Tan, Chris’s college roommate, about whom, a few years ago, Hannah had written the poem, “Henry Tan, the nicest man,” which he was. Henry’s rescue greyhound, Zola, peed all over our old living room rug when Henry and his wife were in the hospital having their twins, and Henry, instead of paying to have it cleaned, bought us a new, more beautiful rug.
They were men I knew well, men who had come over to our house countless times, in various configurations: with their wives, with their kids, for dinner or brunch, to watch basketball. They came over now, one by one, and each of these men, whose intimacies and vulnerabilities and mistakes I guarded, was a stranger to me.
“Uh, hey, Isabel,” they said. “Hey.” They stared at my feet as if my eyeballs had migrated there. “Hey, uh, so. You okay? Okay. Good. Okay.”
They would help Chris lift some boxes and lug them out to the U-Haul and then up a flight of stairs to his new apartment; they would carry out a blue chair from our living room and the old futon from the basement and a bookshelf and, later that day, they’d drive with him to Wegman’s DIY on the other side of town to pick up a kitchen table and a dining room table and a desk, and these men I’d known for so many years, they would be like the futon from the basement and the chair from our living room and the bookshelf: they would be Chris’s now. And if Chris and I ever got back together? I probably wouldn’t even want to see that furniture anymore.
I made blueberry muffins, because I didn’t know what to do with myself, and because we had agreed that most things in the kitchen would stay, even though, in truth, Chris was the better cook, the one with the vision: I mostly just scrambled eggs or waited for water to boil.
I baked muffins while the men lugged boxes. And maybe a tiny part of me thought that the guys would see the muffins and stop in their tracks. Oh, Isabel! they would think. What a dear, good person she is. Chris! they would exclaim. We cannot help you with this vain and foolish task!
Not that Chris wouldn’t move out. Just that Henry and Dave and Kurt and Jack and Gary wouldn’t want to help him anymore, that they wouldn’t be so eager to help him.
I set the muffins out on a plate on the dining room table, and in between trips, the guys ate them, still warm, and either they were too embarrassed to thank me, or they thought those muffins had just appeared there magically, courtesy of the muffin fairy.
Later that day, Valentine’s Day, moving day, Chris called me from his apartment. He had been planning on coming back for one last box of books and some clothes, but Gary and Dave had been able to fit these things into Gary’s minivan, and so, Chris said, there was no need for him to come back, and anyway he would see me the day after tomorrow, to pick up Hannah.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. I heard Kurt’s deep, jovial voice in background, echoing through Chris’s new apartment: “Where do you want this piece of shit?”
“Yup.” I stood in the middle of the living room, which didn’t look so much empty as confusingly rearranged, like one of those games in kids’ magazines: how are these two pictures different? A shelf of books missing. A spot where the chair used to be. The couch where my friend would never sit. A certain quality to the air.
“Iz, it will be.”
I breathed in, out. “Yeah,” I said.
“Okay. Bye.”
···
Cal stood, inches from me, his hand still resting lightly on the kitchen table next to mine. Everything added up to “stay.” All these months, I had been learning the singular lesson that sadness was an infinite resource, accumulating like snow in winter. So why not stay, let a bit of it melt?
“I have to go.”
Cal backed away. “All right. I’ll take you home.” And, yes, there it was, underneath the patience, underneath the truly kind exterior of this amused and tolerant human: the rumble of irritability, finally; the exasperation of another man who had had enough.
He walked over to the living room closet, handed me my jacket, helped me into it. “I’ll just go grab my keys.” He touched my arm, avuncular now, pat-pat.
He was someone who would have cushioned the landing. And yet here I was, jacket on. Sunlight streamed in through the windows. “This has been my favorite day since my husband moved out,” I said, and a tragic little noise came out of me, a little hiccup-laugh.
“All right,” Cal said. “It’s all right.” He took his keys from the hook. His hand was on my back now as he led me, ever so gently, toward the door.
“Iz,” Mark’s e-mail said. “I still want to do it this year. Will you come?” It was early December. Josie had been dead for nine months.
“I know you and I haven’t spoken in a while,” he wrote. That was true. We hadn’t talked since I’d stormed out of the Pig’s Knees in September, after the Andi Friedman revelation. That was how I’d been talking about it to Chris, in those words—the Andi Friedman revelation—like it was the name of some mediocre jazz quartet. Mark had texted me a few times since then, but I never wrote back. Sometimes my righteous indignation was the only thing that got me through the day.
“I know it will be hard without her,” his e-mail went on. “But I think Josie would have wanted us to celebrate.”
“Bullshit,” I typed quickly. “You’re the last person who knows what Josie would have wanted. And how’s your girlfriend, traitor?” Then I deleted those sentences. I wondered, as I had been wondering for months, how much Mark knew: if Josie had confessed to cheating on him, if he knew about Alex Cortez. “Okay,” I wrote. “We’ll be there.”
Our yearly get-together had started out a decade ago as a path through the tangle of the holiday season. December is tricky for Jews and orphans. Josie’s strategy was to employ a military level of productivity, methodically baking dozens of tree- and snowman-shaped sugar cookies while trumpet-heavy Christmas music blared continuously in her kitchen. Chris grew quiet and gloomy, the month of December his yearly descent into darkness, a longing for something he couldn’t even name. Mark grumbled and snarked from the minute the Halloween decorations in the stores came down and the colored lights went up. For my part, I thought, Let’s just be together: Josie and Mark, Chris and Hannah and me. Like always.
Chris and I had never bothered to discuss religion when we were dating. I assumed we’d celebrate all of the holidays with both of our families until we had kids, and then we’d raise them Jewish. It was, I thought, the obvious option when your mother’s family had been decimated in Germany. Our team needed the numbers.
As it turned out, this was news to Chris. He had grown up steeping in a Christmas brew of passive-aggressive muttering and silent, seething disappointment, and he
wanted a do-over. One year, he told me, his father gave his mother a four-pack of felt-tip pens and wrote on the card, “For the lady who has everything. Best regards, Edward,” and his mother took to her bed for two days. Chris wanted, for Hannah, the warmth he had only seen on the Christmas specials—a heart that could grow three sizes, a scraggly Christmas tree made beautiful with a couple of ornaments and a blue blanket and love. Love. That was hard to argue with.
Then again, so was Helene, who, one Passover, as we were leaving her house, handed Chris a box of matzo and said, “You’ll get used to it.”
So we would get together in late December every year, just the five of us. Mark and Josie always had a Christmas tree that Mark actively hated. He delighted in hating it. “Look,” he would say to me, conspiratorially. “It’s a goddamn pine tree, and it’s in our house!” We’d light a menorah some years, if there was overlap. Mark always raised a glass and said, “Here’s to the Jews, who put the s in ‘Happy Holidays’!” We brought each other dramatically awful white elephant gifts: a little figurine of a praying angel; a creepy fish that wiggled its fins and sang “I’m dreaming of a white fishmas”; a sweater for our cat, Mrs. Reinhoffer, that said TEACHER’S PET on it. Mark and Josie doted on Hannah. Over time it came to be the thing we treasured, this little party.
And what would I bring to the festive gathering this year, the first since Josie’s death? What would adequately represent the spirit of this holiday season? A bag of dog shit? A horse’s head?
“We’ll be there,” I wrote. “Can’t wait.”
Mark was hosting it at his new apartment. His parents’ house had sold quickly in October, and he’d moved into a big two-bedroom near the lake.
“I want you to know that Andi will be there,” he wrote, right after I’d said yes. “Please don’t back out. Please just come, Iz.”
Andi answered the door before we even knocked. “I saw you from the window!” she said, wringing her hands. “There they are, I said to myself, and here you are! How are you, Isabel? How are you?” Her eyes darted from Chris to Hannah to me, and she looked like she might start crying from nervousness. I wanted to lift her pretty shawl, a blue-green silk wrap that hung delicately over her slim shoulders, and strangle her with it. But here she was, looking so desperate and hopeful. I reached for her hand in spite of myself.