Second Acts

by Teri Emory

  Christmas, I thought, then New Year’s. So soon. January first, the date that I had told the U.S. Postal Service would be the last day of my temporary change of address.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  I realized I was frowning. “Not about Michelle’s coming. I’m dying to meet her. It’s just that talking about the holidays reminds me that time is passing, and I need to decide . . .”

  “Aren’t you happy here?”

  “I’m happy with you, Peter. But it all still feels like a fairy tale. I haven’t given any thought to making a real life here. I don’t even know if I can. We haven’t talked about the future, and I can’t give up the life I have in New York without knowing more about . . .”

  I started to cry. Peter put his arms around me and pulled me close.

  “What’s wrong with a fairy tale?” He paused. “Look, let’s make an agreement that we’ll put off talking about this until the weekend before Christmas. We can just look forward to Michelle’s visit and enjoy all the Christmas parties we’ll go to this month. Let’s not spoil our fun. Promise me?”

  I promised.

  It felt odd to be spending the holidays in a place where no one even mentioned Chanukah. For the first time since I had come to Savannah, I missed New York. I longed for a look at Lord & Taylor’s Christmas windows, the giant menorah at the synagogue on Park Avenue, the ice-skaters in Central Park.

  How many holiday parties did I go to in Savannah? Whom did I meet? What did I wear? Selective memory again. I remember only one December event clearly, the small dinner party we went to at his friends Travis and Betsy’s house on the Saturday before Christmas. I had pushed to the back of my mind the nagging thought that before the weekend ended, Peter and I were going to discuss what would happen after New Year’s.

  “Travis is about five years older than I am,” Peter told me as we made the short drive to the party. “He went to school with my sister. He was married for about ten years, and then his wife left him for a woman. It took him a long time to recover, as you can imagine. But then, just a few years ago, he and Betsy got together.”

  “Who else will be there?”

  “Their neighbors, Louanne and Peyton . . .” Peter began.

  “Love those Southern names.”

  “Well, not all of us are as lucky as you, to be named for Old Testament heroines,” Peter laughed. “Louanne and Peyton are retired, getting ready to move out West, I think. You’ll be the youngest person at the table tonight. And, of course, the most beautiful.”

  The evening at Travis and Betsy’s began with a tour of their antebellum house. Near the front door was a glass case that displayed Betsy’s collection of Civil War photographs. Portraits of their ancestors lined the walls leading up the stairway to the second floor. Some of the ornaments on their Christmas tree, Travis explained, had been in his family for more than a hundred years. Betsy’s great-grandfather had hand-carved the massive dining room table and ten matching chairs.

  Talk at dinner centered on pensions and retirement. The topic seemed remote to me. Though I faithfully contributed to my retirement plan at school, I had never given much thought to how I wanted to live when I stopped working.

  “It’s hard to believe this will be our last Christmas in Savannah,” Peyton said. “But ever since our son and daughter-in-law moved to Arizona, we’ve sort of known we’d head west eventually. I think Louanne started packing the day our grandson was born out there.”

  “We’ll just stay in town when we stop working,” said Travis. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else. And we have the condo in Hilton Head to use on weekends. Now that I’ve got Betsy hooked on golf . . .”

  Travis turned to Peter. “And you, sir? Will you just sail off to exciting ports?”

  Peter talked about an artists’ retirement colony in Mexico that he had visited years earlier. “There’s a marina right on the property, so I could keep my sailboat, assuming my health stays good enough so I can still hoist the sails. Of course, I’d have to submit a portfolio of my work to get accepted. If I absolutely have to grow old, this is the spot . . .”

  Peter had actually told me about the place once before. He had shown me pictures of the colony. And sitting at Betsy’s heirloom table, with his friends smiling and listening intently, Peter probably used the same language as he talked again about the pristine beaches on the Gulf of Mexico, the charming white stucco cottages, and the list of accomplished artists in residence. But when he described it this time, I caught something that I had missed before.

  There wasn’t a single “we” in his story. “My

  sailboat . . . my health . . . my retirement . . .” And suddenly I saw what should have been visible all along: Peter, so expert at grand romance and heart-stopping passion, was incapable of, or just plain bored by, whatever it is that holds couples together over time. He was happy to have me at his side for as long as I wanted to stay, and as long as a romantic whirlwind engulfed us. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask me to stay for good. He couldn’t risk commitment to anything without a guarantee that the heady feelings would last. Which they never can. Winnie’s husband had it right: an excitement junkie.

  I also recalled a French word I had learned from Sarah: lagniappe, meaning a bonus, a pleasant surprise. It was the perfect word to describe how Peter saw me: extra, unexpected, a gift. Which is not the same thing at all as a partner for life.

  When we got back to Peter’s house, I asked him to stay with me in the living room. He knew at once that something was wrong. We usually headed straight to bed as soon as we returned from a long evening out. This was a conversation I wanted to have sitting upright, fully clothed.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I said.

  “What is it?” he asked, but in a way that told me he already knew what I was going to say.

  “I feel as if the role I can play in your life was set before you met me. I’m forty years old, Peter. Do you think I’ll stay here for ten years and then wave from the shore as you sail off to Mexico? You haven’t said you want me with you. It hasn’t occurred to you to ask if I even like Mexico.”

  “I just don’t think in terms of marriage anymore. I’m sorry if that disappoints you.”

  “You’re missing the point, Peter. It’s not necessarily marriage I want. I want you to think about me automatically when you make important plans for your future.”

  I thought I saw his eyes get teary.

  “I’m sorry, Miriam. I never meant to deceive you.”

  “You didn’t deceive me, Peter. You told me exactly who you were, in a thousand ways. I just wasn’t listening.”

  __________

  I asked Winnie to find me a seat on a flight back to New York.

  “I’m sorry you’re leaving, dear,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m the last-minute specialist, remember?”

  Winnie came through with a plane ticket for Christmas morning. Over the next days, I packed all my things in the same boxes I had used when I first came to Savannah. Peter had carefully saved them in the garage. I left hanging on the bedroom wall the enlarged photo of me in my green dress, the one he had taken the night of my birthday.

  Peter made himself scarce at the house while I packed to leave, claiming he had Christmas shopping to do. It was probably true. Last minute for everything.

  I called Miss Emma to say goodbye. “Your invitation to New York still stands,” I told her.

  “I do hope I see you again, Miriam. Please keep in touch with me. My son doesn’t have much sense sometimes, but that doesn’t mean you and I can’t be friends.”

  On the morning I left Savannah, I put Peter’s Christmas present—a new bathrobe—under his tree, along with a scarf I had bought for his mother.

  I refused his offer to drive me to the airport.

  “You’ll have a long wait at the airport for Michelle’s flight. She wo
n’t be in until this afternoon. I’ll just call a taxi.”

  When my ride arrived, we stood in the doorway and watched the driver put my suitcases in the trunk of the car. Peter reached in his pocket and pulled out a small, flat package loosely covered with several sheets of red and green tissue paper.

  “I didn’t have time to wrap it properly,” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Inside the tissue paper was a delicate ceramic tile, intricately painted with a scene of a familiar Savannah street corner. A tiny sign on one of the buildings said “Elizabeth on 37th.”

  “I know the artist who makes these,” he said. “He did this one especially for me to give to you. We had some fun that night, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, Peter,” I said. “We had some fun.”

  I held Peter’s present in my lap for the whole ride to the airport. I don’t recall anything about the flight home, or landing at LaGuardia, which must have been frenzied with holiday travelers. I do remember high snowdrifts on the sidewalks and the first biting breath of winter air as I stepped outside the terminal. And I know I was back in the city for the last few days of Chanukah and in time to see the tree at Rockefeller Center and the shop windows on Fifth Avenue, still decorated for the holidays.

  Beth:

  Sleight-of-Mind

  “Yesterday,

  All my troubles seemed so far away

  Now it looks as though they’re here to stay.”

  —Paul McCartney

  Insomnia is a way of life for me lately, a perverse menopausal dividend. I’m awake before sunrise every day. No hope of falling back to sleep. I don’t even try anymore. I lie still in my bed, tuning out the soft rattle of my husband’s breathing, ignoring the impending daylight trickling in through window shutters.

  A familiar mental ritual fills the minutes between this premature awakening and the rest of my day. I traipse through my memories like a tourist without a roadmap, lingering in neighborhoods that appear safe, avoiding war zones. Trying to fathom how I got here.

  Despite my training as an analyst, I give my childhood short shrift in these pre-dawn exercises. I’m sure that what I’m after is linked to grownup things. Psychoanalysis shed light on my life’s beginnings. It’s my adulthood that remains in shadow.

  My thoughts travel easily to the early days with Jim, before we were married, when he was in graduate school at Cornell. We lived on Prospect Street in Ithaca for two years, in a crummy, furnished apartment where there was never enough heat and the roof leaked. We had a two-burner stove and a copy of Macrobiotic Kitchen Magic from which we concocted endless and largely tasteless variations on overcooked vegetables and brown rice. We had to sell Jim’s books at the end of each semester to afford groceries.

  Thirty years ago. Before our two children were born. Before I was a therapist. Before we were voted Laurel Falls Citizens of the Year. Before we were on a first-name basis with our mayor, two Senators, and an army of lawyers and financial wizards who help us manage the fortune Jim has earned. Before Jim’s company bought the apartment for him in Lower Manhattan so that he can catch a nap and return to his office for the opening of the London and Tokyo markets.

  Before our son Adam died.

  Once my mind travels to Adam, scenes from his life unfold before me like a film in slow motion that I can’t help but watch to the end.

  He’s four years old, pleading to delay bedtime for one more reading of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

  He’s seven, dressed for soccer practice in the uniform that is two sizes too large, calling to me from the garage, “Hurry, Mom! Coach doesn’t like it when we’re late!”

  He’s eleven, laughing at one of his own silly jokes, with a grin that reveals neon orange rubber bands coiled around his braces.

  He’s fifteen, sitting on the old blue sofa in the family room, holding hands with his first girlfriend, Sheila, and watching his favorite movie, ET, for the hundredth time.

  He’s nineteen, a freshman at college, and he’s calling to say his roommate is too weird, college is too hard, he’s coming home for the weekend. The conversation that was the beginning of the end of his life.

  He’s twenty-two, and he and Jim and I are sitting together in a therapy session with several other families. It’s Adam’s fourth stay at his fourth drug rehab center in two years. He is too thin and his affect is blunted from medication. With robotic delivery, he tells the group that he is ready to move beyond addiction to recovery. I want to believe him.

  He’s twenty-three. It’s his birthday and he’s opening presents. He thanks Jim and me for the leather jacket, his sister Nicole for the Beatles CD, his grandmother for the bicycle helmet.

  He’s twenty-three and five days, and a funeral director is suggesting that, in light of the circumstances of Adam’s death, the casket would be better left closed at the service.

  Three years have passed since Jim and I buried our son. Jim doesn’t talk on his own about Adam. If someone else mentions Adam’s name, Jim clenches his jaw and responds in few words. Our daughter Nicole now says she’s thinking about becoming a drug counselor when she graduates from college, but I’m not sure how much of that is real, how much is Adam. Hearing her talk about it makes me frantic. Will any of us—Jim, Nicole, me—ever be all right again?

  After Adam died, I took six months off from my psychotherapy practice. I couldn’t imagine guiding patients through their twisted lives without my own feelings getting in the way.

  I dealt with my grief in frequent counseling sessions with Dr. Dominick Moros, who had supervised me in my analytic training and is the best therapist I know. Dr. Moros (we have become colleagues, but I cannot bring myself to call him by his first name) respected my refusal to take antidepressants. I needed to talk, talk, talk my way through heartache; I didn’t want my mood chemically elevated. He helped me to put my lingering guilt in perspective and to focus on the people in my life who loved me and depended on me to love them.

  Throughout those terrible months, Sarah and Miriam put their own lives on hold, spending every possible minute with me in Connecticut. Jim’s way was to grieve in solitude, but I needed my friends. Sarah was between jobs; instead of looking for work, she took the train up from the city every Monday morning and stayed until Friday, when Miriam took over for the weekend. They let me talk, sleep, rage, be silent as I needed to.

  Eventually, I pieced myself together well enough so that I now present to the world an uncanny, lifelike replica of my old self. I wake up every morning. I shower, I dress. I see friends. I laugh. I treat patients. I volunteer at the museum. I give thoughtful advice to my daughter. I make love with my husband. Time, the sages say, is a great healer.

  Ah, but I have fooled the sages. Time brings no relief. I have outlived my first-born. Nothing, nothing, nothing can be the same for me since Adam left this life.

  __________

  My first appointment of the day is a new patient. Madeline Foster, a middle-aged woman. My age, in fact. A woman with a good job and a nice family and close friends, who says that most mornings it’s an effort for her to get out of bed.

  Madeline describes herself as someone who has always done what was expected of her. Women like Madeline and me, we were taught to follow the rules. There was a time when we may have talked defiantly, flirted with the bohemian, but ultimately, we wound up rebelling only against our own longings. Madeline says she thought that being a grownup meant she had to trade excitement for security. We all thought like that.

  Madeline and I are alike in one fundamental way, members of the first generation of women to feel entitled to interesting lives. And so, as disappointments accrue and our spirits fail, we take high-powered jobs and gourmet cooking classes and, only as a last resort, lovers. We raise funds to fight breast cancer and save endangered animals and put more books on school library shelves. We indulge in New Age rites to ge
t in touch with our spirituality. We enter therapy (or become therapists) to get in touch with our emotions. We have devoted ourselves to meeting the needs of husbands and children, yet we speculate from time to time about what life might have held in store had we married different men, or not had children, or not married at all.

  In the middle of our lives, we wonder if it is too late to renew ourselves. We wonder why we are sad so much of the time.

  Following the rules, we’ve discovered, is painful and costly.

  Madeline says she has become invisible to her husband. He works eighty hours a week. When he’s home, he reads or sleeps. The last time they made love was on a vacation in Bermuda, almost two years ago. They have two sons, teenagers Madeline describes as “a handful, you know, like all kids these days.” Madeline is a legal secretary, having sacrificed a promising career years ago as a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi.

  “Why did you leave advertising?” I ask.

  “Bill was away so much on business. I couldn’t keep a job where I had to work long hours or where they asked me to travel. One of us had to be available for the children. Becoming a legal secretary made things convenient. For everyone.”

  “Do you like the work?”

  “I’m pretty good at my job, so my bosses always say nice things about me.

  “Why do you think you’re depressed?”

  “I know the signs. I’ve read a lot about it, and some of my friends have told me I seem quieter than usual.”

  “Quieter?”

  “Subdued, really. I’m usually a talker, at least with people I know, but I don’t feel like saying much these days.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t have anything interesting to say. I feel old and tired and boring. Boring!”

  At this, she begins to sniffle. I hand her a box of Kleenex.

  “Dr. Gillian,” she says, “can you give me some medication? I know you’re not a medical doctor, but I think I should be on Prozac or something.”