It’s been a few days since my conversation with Grace about our tuition issue when I stand in the doorway and watch Gary pull from a giant purple bong. I used to come down here late at night to throw in a load or two of laundry, but after a few times of catching the muted but unmistakable moan and groan of online porn coming from behind the makeshift curtain room divider, it seemed safer and less awkward to use the machine during the day. With the curtain open now, the gurgling of the bong is deafening. Usually he uses a sleek little black vaping inhaler, but every now and then, when he comes home early enough, he likes to go old-school with smoke and dirty water and bubbles. He finally notices me, covering my ears melodramatically with my hands, and grins.
“Want some?” he croak-talks without exhaling, angling the bong in my direction.
“No thanks.” Gary smokes entirely too much pot these days, even though it’s the medically prescribed kind, formulated especially for his kind of debilitating anxiety, with all the THC removed—something I’d even managed to work into a few of my top-read Well/er posts. (“Is the ‘new pot’ for you?” “Why cannabis beats Klonopin for anxiety.” “If just seeing the word cannabis makes you anxious, keep reading.” “Yes, pot sommelier is a thing, and you need one.”) But, as usual, I don’t say anything. Why open myself up to the conversation that would certainly follow—the one that would surely include my role in the fact that our marriage is essentially over even if we can’t afford to live separately like normal people? Why would I want to go there when I can just pretend to ignore the fact that he is smoking himself into oblivion? Isn’t that what marriage is all about? Avoiding terrible arguments and self-examination that could expose your own complicity in the breakdown of your union?
But there has always been Teddy to consider, his happiness, the preservation and protection of what’s left of his childhood, and so we came up with a practical affordable solution that seems to be working for us: an in-house separation masquerading as separate sleeping arrangements due to intense snoring. Separated but still living together. And every six months or so we assuage our guilt for failing each other by going through the motions of seeing a new couples therapist on the off chance that we can change or, at the very least, improve on our imperfect solution. It’s also fun. We get to tweak an unsuspecting therapist who has no idea that we know we’re beyond help. It is performance art, cheaper and more fun than a dinner-and-movie date night.
I watch the smoke pour out of his mouth—so much smoke that I quickly close the sling over the dog’s head so she won’t get a contact high. “Every time you ask me I say no. So why do you keep asking?”
“Because maybe one day you’ll say yes.” Gary closes his eyes, throws his head back. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops—at all.”
I sit down in the guest chair. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson is in the middle of the train table, an elastic band around it. I pick it up and run my fingers over the title. “You gave this to me after our first date. Remember?”
“Of course I remember,” he says, with a slow shake of his head. “God, how pretentious.”
“It wasn’t pretentious. It was sweet.” I touch the elastic band until it makes a sad twang. “We’d left that bookstore reading early. Of course.”
“Because it was so insufferable.”
“And because we love leaving early.” Especially when we feel justified in leaving early. That night: an independent bookstore on the Upper West Side when we still lived in New York, a few months after we’d started dating. A pompous windbag-author was reading from a biography of Henry James, my favorite writer in college—I’d loved how seemingly tiny moments were often his character’s biggest turning points—droning from a makeshift podium amid folding chairs full of tweedy types with corduroy pants and public television tote bags.
Stuck in a middle row, holding hands, we’d exchanged glances during his insufferable presentation—Ready. Set. Go.—then, without words, we’d fled, like shoplifters. Outside on the sidewalk, excited by our tiny theft of time and freedom, we’d kissed, long and hard, then finished with a faux-theatrical dip. We were That Couple, full of passion and snark and the private loathing of others.
“I’m so glad we left,” he’d whispered into my hair. It was summer, late evening, all the light still left in the sky turning pink and purple and orange as dusk fell.
“Me, too.”
“I hate readings.”
“Me, too.”
“Let’s never go to another one again.”
I’d nodded. How fun it was to make rules—future rules—rules about what we would and wouldn’t do—together. After spending most of my life feeling utterly alone in the world, surviving the cycle of dating and heartbreak that repeated itself over and over again throughout my twenties and early thirties, I now felt part of a secret world: all it took was this one person for us to create a whole new parallel universe. I never wanted to leave it.
“Unless it’s a reading for your book,” he said. “Then I’ll go.”
“How do you know there will be a book?” I said. I was still waiting to hear from Glenn, my older editor-colleague-friend at Black Bear Books, who had recently been transferred to our publisher’s flagship office in Boston when we went through a sudden company-wide downsizing. Things were slower there than in New York, she had told me, but I was still convinced that in the end the news I’d get would be bad.
“Because of course there will be a book,” he’d said without a trace of doubt. “Glenn will love it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know Glenn.” Gary had been an office temp, on and off, at Black Bear for years after college while he was still trying to get his music career off the ground. “She loves you and she’s going to love your book. It’ll all work out.”
I didn’t understand his faith in the future, his relentless hopefulness. It didn’t make sense to me: how people believed in the positive when the negative was so much more likely. My family had never uttered that phrase—that things would work out—because, quite simply, they didn’t believe it. They knew from almost direct experience in fact—my parents’ parents were all Holocaust survivors—that often things didn’t work out and that sometimes the worst happened instead. Faith in the future was not part of my DNA, and trusting Gary felt like telling myself to stare at the horizon while on choppy water: if I kept my eyes trained on him, maybe it would all be okay.
I’d smiled and let him pull me toward him again. “See, that’s what I love about you,” he said. “How hope-challenged you are.”
I remember that moment, staring at him, frozen. It was the first time he’d used the word love, and I wasn’t sure whether to acknowledge it, to ask if he meant love-love or if he simply uttered it in the gleeful afterglow of having been released from inexorable boredom. Like so many other times, before and after, I would let a moment pass without asking an important question. Better not to know than to get the wrong answer. Instead I just asked this: