They were standing waist-deep in the lake, watching a sailboat moving off into the distance. They’d been watching it for a long time, caught up in its slowly diminishing size, and now it was little more than a speck, tiny and formless, buoyed up by the swell of the horizon.
“You’d never know it was a sailboat,” he said. “It could be anything.”
“It’s so small,” she said. “It could be a grain of salt.”
“A grain of salt. That’s about the size of it.”
“Balanced on the edge of the world.”
“See how it’s almost vibrating?”
“Shimmering. As if it were humming.”
“Getting ready to dematerialize.”
“Vanish into eternity.”
“It’s going to be spectacular.”
“Like seeing the impossible.”
“Like seeing into the cosmic works.”
Clinging to each other, giddy with anticipation and eyestrain, they were doing their best not to blink for fear of missing the beat in time when the laws of physics would collapse and the impossible would happen—a sailboat disappearing right before their eyes. Still wet from their swim, young, in love, sheltered by the overarching sky, they absorbed this experience as something, an exaltation, a moment of breaking through and coming together, a celebration. And when miraculously it happened, the sailboat disappeared, and there was no gap—not an instant—between when he saw it and when she saw it, when they shouted out in unison, a spontaneous cheer, that’s when he said it. “Let’s get married.” An exuberant thought for an exuberant moment. A moment that she would like now to recapture and reconsider.
10
HIM
On the morning of October first Todd wakes early. He lies on his back holding his penis, grasping at the trailing wisps of an erotic dream. When the dream is finally, irrevocably lost he turns on his side and shimmies across the expanse of bed that separates him from Jodi. She has her back to him, knees drawn up. Wrapping an arm around her waist he molds himself to her curled spine. She makes a sound low in her throat, but her rhythmic breathing is not disrupted. Filled with the scent of her, a blend of clean hair and warm skin, he closes his eyes and sinks into a drowsy torpor. It isn’t till he wakes for a second time that the trouble he’s in overtakes him, bursting on his thoughts like a thunderclap.
Moving Day.
He sees the words in block letters on a blinking marquee, as a wispy banner in a blue sky, drawn with a stick in wet sand. At no point did he actually come to a decision, and even now he can’t say that his mind is made up. But he feels a forward momentum, an urge to make a break for it, get out of his comfort zone, shake himself up. It’s something like pulling up roots and moving to a foreign country, the feeling that people must have who do that, an appetite for the exotic, an impulse to create themselves anew. He knows that his restlessness is partly biological but favors a story of renewal. He knows, too, that what he’s about to do will make him a walking cliché, but his instinct for self-forgiveness is strong.
Natasha has insisted that he take the day off work. He’s agreed to show up at her place around ten, to coincide with the arrival of the movers. Her junky furniture and kitchenware will at least give them something to start with. One thing Todd is not going to do is fight with Jodi over household goods. Whatever happens he will not turn this into a petty squabble. The breakup is going to cost him, that much he knows, but the fear he has about his financial future is still indeterminate, a specter without shape or form. He’s avoided giving it substance in the same way that he’s avoided a lot of things. Calling his lawyer, for instance. Telling Jodi that he’s leaving.
It’s going to be awkward now; he gets that. With something like this it’s a bad idea to wait until the last possible moment. When it comes to any sort of change or disruption, women are very involved with timing. But who knows, maybe Jodi will be understanding. She is good-natured, not possessive or territorial, and she has a way of taking things in stride.
He gets out of bed and dresses without waking her. It’s hard to grasp that this is happening, that tonight he won’t be coming home, that he’ll never again sleep next to her in this familiar room, that their life together, which he always envisioned as something like rolling hills, was really a train on a track, moving toward a final destination. He tries and fails to picture the rental apartment in River North. He was in it for fifteen minutes at most, and for ten of those minutes he was getting things settled with the landlord.
When Jodi makes her appearance he’s sitting at the table thumbing through the morning paper and working on his third cup of coffee.
“You’re still here,” she says.
An explanation is required, but although he’s been dawdling for close to an hour, he’s given no thought to what he ought to say.
“Are you going out with the dog?” he asks.
“Yes, why?” She’s holding a leash in one hand and keys in the other.
“I’ll come with you.”
She frowns. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Just. I need to talk to you.”
“Tell me.”
“Wait till we get outside.”
In the elevator they stand three abreast facing front: him, Jodi, the dog. Someone should be waiting with a camera in the lobby, ready to snap them when the doors open. This moment in time is worth capturing, the family group just before it breaks apart, tectonic plates once aligned shifting into disjunction. Everything different. No going back. It could be worst of all for the dog, who won’t understand what’s happened and will sleep with one eye open, expecting him home at every moment. As they head toward the water tears are streaming down his face. Jodi doesn’t comment. Maybe she hasn’t noticed. She’s said nothing since they stepped outside, when she remarked that it was a bright day and put on her sunglasses. She must know what’s coming, especially if she spoke to Dean, as Natasha claims. Her silence strikes him as dense and purposeful, a barricade.
They cross the bike path to the grass verge by the lake and let the dog off leash. The waterfront is busy for a weekday morning. People are taking in the early autumn sun, storing it up for the winter ahead. She stands facing inland, framed by the luminous backdrop of sky and water. He sees himself in the lens of her sunglasses, shoulders slumped, runnels glistening on his cheeks. Her eyes are hidden but he senses that her mood has changed, that she somehow knows and understands.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
He draws her to him and sobs into the top of her head. She makes no move to resist and slackens in his arms. They share a moment of wracking grief, pressed warmly against each other, breast to breast, heartbeat to heartbeat, together as one in the morning light. Only when they break apart and she changes position, making a quarter turn and taking off her sunglasses, does he see his mistake. She is dry-eyed and scowling, brows drawn together, eyes full of suspicion.
“What is it?” she asks. “What did you want to tell me?”
He’s sorry now that he got himself into this. It would have been better to leave her a note, something brief and inconclusive to ease her into the new arrangement. Why have a confrontation when no confrontation would be kinder to them both? The face-to-face encounter is too harsh, the finality it’s bound to create. There’s no need to build a wall out of talk. Words are like tools, easily turned into weapons, creating closure where none is needed. Life is not words. People by nature are awash in ambivalence, swept along by winds that are fickle and skittish.
“I thought you knew,” he says. “I thought you talked to Dean.”
Her expression doesn’t change. The look she’s giving him is narrow and flinty. He feels as if he’s shrinking, withering from within.
“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t make it hard for me. It’s not like I planned this. It’s just the roll of the dice. We don’t decide everything that happens to us. You know that.” He feels like a jerk. She hasn’t said a word but she has him on the run. He turns away from her and look
s across the grass to where two men are tossing a Frisbee back and forth.
“What exactly are you saying?” she asks.
“Listen. I’m sorry. I won’t be coming home tonight.”
“What do you mean you won’t be coming home? Where will you be?”
“I’m moving out,” he says. “You really didn’t know?”
“You’re moving out? Where are you going?”
“You remember Natasha Kovacs.” He makes it a statement rather than a question. “It isn’t that I don’t love you.”
The noisy public quarrel that ensues surprises them both. For years they’ve kept their differences at bay. The worst of it is that the argument centers on irrelevancies. As he knew she would, Jodi fixates on his timing.
“Good of you to tell me,” she says. “I’m so happy that you didn’t wait any longer. I wouldn’t want to be the last to congratulate you.”
He hates it when she’s sarcastic. “You’re right,” he says. “I screwed up. I’m guilty. I made a mess of it.”
“Oh well, it’s your loss,” she says. “I could have thrown you a party. Bought you a gold watch.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
“And why is that? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because I didn’t know myself what I was going to do.”
“You knew I’d kick you out is why you didn’t tell me.”
“That’s not true.”
“I would have kicked you out.”
“Yes, but that’s not what I was thinking.”
“What were you thinking, Todd? Just tell me that. What was going through your mind? Why would you wait until the second you’re walking out the door to share the news with me?”
“I told you. I didn’t know what I wanted. It’s complicated. The situation is complicated.”
“You signed a lease on an apartment over a week ago. You signed a lease! How complicated is that?”
“So you did know. You knew all along.”
“I didn’t believe it. I didn’t think you would go through with it.”
Both of them are shouting, flinging the words across the space of years. Part of him wants to relent, tell her that it’s all a big mistake, that he doesn’t know what he was thinking. He understands that this is in her mind too—it’s what she would like and maybe half expects—for the whole ugly mess to end up a tempest in a teapot, conclude with a show of forgiveness and later on an evening on the town, champagne cocktails, a walk along the river in moonlight. It’s a pleasant vision, and he could almost go there.
Without warning she lets out a howl and charges him with fists clenched. He’s twice her size and catches her wrists with little effort. She swings a knee but he has her at arm’s length and holds her off. In the end she tires herself out, and he lets her go. Her hair is disheveled, her face is contorted, and she’s panting. People are staring. He looks around for Freud and spots him in some nearby shrubbery, digging a hole the way dogs do—rump in the air, tail waving, paws flying.
“Okay,” she says. “Go and get your things. You have ten minutes. I don’t want to see you when I get home.”
11
HER
As the northern hemisphere hurtles away from the sun, the lengthening nights and disappearing days strike her as a punishment designed for her selectively. Harsh winds whip up rain and fog, whistle through trees, and slam into windowpanes. Leaves that were green just last week have turned the color of piss and dung and are piling up on the pavement. For Jodi, the reckless speed of these meteorological changes stands in mocking contrast to the thudding march of time, every day a weight that she drags behind her.
Mornings, when she opens her eyes, cheek on the pillow, breath moving in gentle waves, the first thing she sees is the overstuffed chair in the corner, its wide seat and squat arms, its slipcover of silky polished cotton with a light and dark design of vines. She traces the leafy pattern with a child’s eye, her mind suspended in a pleasant meditation, till the moment comes when she faces the fact that getting out of bed to start her day is the violent and pointless thing she has to do.
Curiously, it’s not so much his physical absence that causes her pain. It was often the case that he didn’t come home till after she’d fallen asleep, and he was normally gone before she woke up in the morning. What bothers her most is the blow to her routine. She misses the hours spent poring over cookbooks, composing a menu, shopping for ingredients, putting a twist on his favorite foods. And then there’s the weight of the chores that always fell to him—walking the dog after dinner, taking her car to be serviced. Even putting the trash in the chute feels like a sad and onerous thing that she should not be forced to do. The daily paper poses another problem. Having quit her practice of carefully refolding it and leaving it for him on the coffee table, she finds that its absence can take her by surprise. At times she stands in his wardrobe, rearranging his jackets. One day she took all the T-shirts out of his drawers, shook them out, refolded them, and put them back again.
Her shattered routine leaves her at loose ends, but worse still, much of what she used to enjoy no longer brings her any pleasure at all. Stepping outside in the morning and taking the measure of the day. Fondling the dog’s velvety ears. Slipping into a four-hundred-thread-count Italian shirt and doing up the small pearly buttons. She has no taste for any of it, and now, when she waves to the doorman as she passes through the lobby, she can only imagine his pity and curiosity. Without a doubt she is the subject of gossip and speculation throughout the building. Her neighbors, she notes, are different in their treatment of her, even if it’s just their intonation when they say hello or the way their eyes linger on her face.
It’s no help that Dean has been leaving tirades on her voice mail, piling his distress on top of hers. She knows that, like her, Dean has been sideswiped—dealt the kind of lateral blow that you never see coming—and maybe it eases his pain to rant and rave, but Dean’s pain is not her problem. Of course, given her profession, people do this to her all the time, as if they think she’s programmed to deal with their complaints.
The best hours of the day are those she spends with clients. She loves the challenge of the consulting room, the complexities her clients bring to her—the life puzzles, the guard coming down, the learning to trust, the tides of resistance. Some are more locked in than others, but by and large people who bother to seek her out are motivated to change, steeped in enough emotional pain to make the effort. Her clients bring out the best in her. She likes herself more when she’s with them, especially now, with her world shaken and her optimism failing. With clients she can be patient, compassionate, receptive, and they reward her with their progress, the fitful forward movement, the cracks that open to the light. The other day Jane Doe said about her husband: “When he tells me what to do it makes me feel safe. I like the shelter of subservience.” Astonishing. An absolute first for Jane in owning her predicament, a plain acknowledgment that, concerning her marriage, she is less a victim and more a participant, a bold step on the path to self-realization. It also provided a clue as to why Jane has stuck it out, not that Jodi finds it puzzling that she has. There are lots of reasons why a woman stays with a man, even when she’s given up on changing him and can predict with certainty the shape that the rest of her life with him is going to take. Her mother had a reason. Every woman has a reason.
There was a time when she used to say about Todd: “He’s a weakness of mine. I have a weakness for him.” She said this to herself and to her friends in the way of a justification. Bending yourself out of shape for a man is not a popular thing to do these days, certainly not the emancipated way of going about a relationship. Sacrificing your values on the altar of love no longer holds up as an ideology. Tolerance, beyond a point, is not widely preached, even though, inevitably, when two people rub shoulders on a daily basis, when they inhale each other’s way of being as a life premise, there is going to be a sacrifice of sorts. You will not be the same person coming o
ut of a relationship as you were going into it. Not that she understood this then, in the beginning. When she confronted him, when he apologized, when they shed tears, when they reaffirmed their love, when they did this time after time, she didn’t sense the renunciation that was going on within her, because after all he was Todd, and he was precious to her. Even his sedition could be precious, his way of remaining true to himself. He wasn’t cruel about it, never unkind. You could never say about Todd that he was mean-spirited or spiteful. Quite the opposite was true. If you crossed Todd he’d give you another chance, and if you crossed him a hundred times he’d give you a hundred chances. But Todd was bound and determined to live his life, and all she could do in the end was accept this, even knowing that what she had become was a version of her mother. In spite of making different choices, in spite of living in different times, in spite of being forewarned by her education in psychology, which taught her that the buck passes from one generation to the next, the predicament she landed in was the very one she had set out to avoid.
She does better on days when there’s something to look forward to: her flower-arranging class or dinner out. It’s hard to be peevish in a room full of fresh-cut blooms or surrounded by well-dressed strangers in the festive social space of a restaurant. She makes an effort to pace her dinner dates, methodically rotating through her friends to avoid calling on any one of them too often. When she talks about her situation she does it with an air of detachment, sometimes laughing and toasting the power of youth. Her friends, she finds, are relieved that she’s taking it so well.
It’s only with Alison that her guard comes down. Jodi and Alison have been getting together often, more so than usual—for an early lunch before Alison’s shift or dinner on her day off. Alison is the only one of her friends who demurs when she makes light of her situation. She’s also the only friend who picks up on the fact that Jodi has been waiting for Todd to come home.
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