“I’m not going,” she repeated.
Simon grew still. “You don’t think it’s going to pan out for the band?” Simon said. “Is that it? You think two days and, boom, it’s over for us?”
“Did I say that?”
“Your face did. Your whole body.”
Simon reached for his guitar and picked out a few notes, something he always did when he wanted to retreat into his own private little space. She didn’t understand how he could do that, trance out of the world.
“Simon,” she said, and he kept playing. “Simon,” she said again, and he plucked a string so hard it snapped. She touched him. He felt so far away.
He looked at her from under his thick lashes, something that once would have made her want to kiss him. Now, though, she was simply annoyed. Grow up, she wanted to tell him. Keep pace with me. She gulped more wine, tears crowding behind her eyes.
“We’re getting older,” she told him. “We’re not kids here.”
“Forty-two still qualifies as kids,” Simon said, and Stella knew he meant it. Simon still wore the same tight T-shirts and jeans he did when he was in his twenties. He spent hours in the gym. His hero was Mick Jagger, prancing around the stage in his seventies, making everyone believe nothing was ridiculous, nothing is impossible. Up close, she could see the fine age lines etched on Simon’s face. One day, she caught him using her expensive skin creams. She watched him brush her mascara wand over his hair, coloring the gray at the temples. When he saw her watching him, he gave her a goofy smile. “McCartney dyes his hair,” Simon said. “I’ll bet you anything Mick Jagger wears a wig. We’re not old. Not yet.”
“We’re getting there,” she said. “Our forties are rushing past us. Then comes fifty. And whoa, coming right at you, there’s seventy.”
“Now you’re being silly,” Simon said.
She didn’t have to ask herself what she loved about him, why she had stayed for so long. She knew there were scientific explanations for love, that pheromones could make you attracted to someone, that even kissing was tasting each other’s DNA and seeing if you could make good, healthy children. Love, she had read, was a chemical addiction to dopamine.
Was it something chemical that allowed her to forgive him when he forgot to meet her at the movies or a restaurant where they actually had a hard-gotten reservation, when she had to nag him to see a doctor for checkups, to keep his inside as tuned and cared for as he did his outside? She remembered every anniversary they’d ever had. The first time he saw her. The first time they made love. The first time he said I love you.
The last time.
Simon flopped onto the couch away from her. She knew they had problems, but she knew that solutions were out there. You just had to trust you would find them.
He looked at her helplessly. “This gig in LA could change everything.”
“You can go do it. I’ll support you like crazy from here. But it won’t change what I want.”
His shoulders slumped. He looked up at her and she suddenly hated herself for having this argument. She reached for him, but her fingers just missed his sleeve. She tried to catch his scent, but her nose was too stuffed. “Sit by me,” she said. “We can’t talk to each other this way. It just makes everything worse.”
He shifted and sat beside her. His body loosened, and then hers did, too. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me, too.” She rested her head against his shoulder.
“Do we not have the same dreams anymore?” he said sadly.
She looked at him, alarmed. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel it and it scares me.”
“What?” she said. “What?”
He got up and paced, his hand pushing at his hair, the way he always did when he was upset.
“We need to calm down,” she said. She took another sip of wine, then set it on a table. “This isn’t helping much.”
He stopped and looked at her. “Do you want to smoke some weed?”
“Are you kidding?” She hadn’t smoked weed in years, and she had thought he had given it up, too. “It’ll kill my throat,” she said, after considering the possibility.
“What else, then?” he said. He grabbed a cigarette from the table, then dug in his pocket. “Where’re the fucking matches,” he said, and then, startled, he brought up two small pills. “I didn’t know I even had these,” he said.
She frowned. She thought that he had given up drugs years ago, in his midtwenties, the same time she had. “Why do you have them?”
Simon rolled the pills in his hands. “I don’t know. I just do.”
In the early days, she had been so naive that she didn’t know that he did drugs at all. She didn’t see that other side of him until she was truly, deeply, madly in love, which she admitted seemed to happen by week three, and by then it was too late. They were already living together when one night he came home high, his eyes red, his breathing rough, and everything in her tightened. She knew medicine. She knew what drugs did to the body because she had treated addicts and, even worse, kids who had partied a bit too hard and then gotten behind the wheel of a car. “It’s nothing,” he’d said, waving her away. “I’m just keyed up.”
She believed him because she wanted to. But then she began to spend time with the band, at Kevin’s apartment, where there were cocaine lines on bureau tops, on coffee tables, on mirrors. There were tabs of acid and peyote, mushrooms, and opium, but they weren’t what Simon did. He hated needles and passed on the hallucinogens. Instead, he drank alcohol. He smoked weed, which didn’t seem so bad to Stella, and once or twice, when his energy bottomed out, he took Ritalin, and when she saw him with the pill in his hand, she tried to hold his fingers, to keep that pill from going up to his mouth, but he waved her hands away. “It’s medicinal for me,” he told her. He said that taking that pill made lightning shoot through his brain, making him so laser focused he could practice until dawn, his stage strut growing more brash, more confident. “It’s for work,” he insisted.
She told herself she could understand that, she could forgive it. She never saw him in a stupor. If anything, the drugs just made him happier. He couldn’t believe his good luck at being in the world, being with her. And then one day, he had told her (he told her everything) that the real reason he took the drugs was so he could go onstage and not hear his father’s voice thrumming in his head, telling him over and over, Who do you think you are? Who are you that you think you deserve this because you don’t. She had held him closer. She understood that feeling. She had felt it herself, that feeling of not being enough, of being a fraud, when she was a little girl and her parents shooed her out of the room so they could be together in private. She felt it when her friends asked her how she got to be the one to get lucky in love when their relationships were all breaking apart. Who was she to be this happy?
Simon had never pressed her to try any of the drugs, but one night, after comforting a friend whose girlfriend had left a note that said, There’s nobody else, but I stopped loving you, Stella grew scared. What if she wasn’t lucky but instead was stupid or blind? What if her own relationship was in trouble and she didn’t even know it? How could you know for sure how things might go? Her mother had never doubted her father’s love, but his death had been sharp and sudden. Her mother had moved to Spain with all her scrapbooks of her husband, her memories, and she still brought him into every conversation, as if that were a way of keeping him present. But her mother wasn’t Stella. What if Simon grew tired of her, the way she kept asking him if he loved her, the way she sometimes trailed him from room to room, needing to know he was still there?