Separation Anxiety - Laura Zigman Page 0,14

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:

“Is that a hardcover book in your pants or are you just glad to see me?”

He’d laughed, then reached into his jacket and handed me a book of poems. “I was so bored I forgot to give it to you.”

As I looked at the book jacket and the pages in disbelief—I was thirty-five years old and no man had ever given me a book of poetry until that night—he touched a wisp of hair that had come loose from my ponytail. “And just so you know, when it’s your reading, I’ll go and I’ll stay through the whole thing.”

“Well, you’ll have to. Because I’ll have to stay. Because I’ll be the one reading.”

“That’s true. Besides: leaving early alone isn’t nearly as fun as leaving early together.”

I’d looked at the book again and then leaned into him, putting my forehead, then my ear, on his chest. I remember hearing his heart beating underneath his T-shirt, a sound I was still getting used to, a language I only partially understood. There may or may not have been tears in my eyes when I’d whispered, “Someone’s getting lucky tonight.”

But I was the one who’d gotten lucky: I’d gotten an answer without having to actually ask a question. And I’d gotten someone loyal and loving beyond measure.

That was a lifetime ago. Now, a few hours before our teenager will be home from school, the book is a relic, a souvenir of a time and place I sometimes don’t believe actually existed. I flick the elastic a few times with my finger and wince at its flat tuneless sound. “What’s with the rubber band?” I say, looking at the book’s spine to see if it has somehow split and would explain the need for something to keep it together.

“Some of the pages came loose. Because I read it so much.” He takes the book from me, puts it on his lap, pets it. A little too lovingly, I think, until he throws his head back and sighs loudly. “God, what happened to us? We had such promise. Now we can’t even afford to separate like normal people.” He stares somewhere off into the middle distance. “Maybe I should just go back to law school already.”

I look at the book in his lap, then at the dog in the sling in my lap. Our marriage, our finances, our life are in ruins. I sigh. “It’s time.”

Gary sits up. “I’m not quitting pot. I can’t. I’m not ready. Nothing, not even Klonopin, touches the anxiety like weed.”

“I know. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

It takes him a second or two to understand, but when he does he shakes his head. “Oh, no. Not again.”

“We have to. We have to find another therapist.”

“Do we?”

“Don’t we?” I, too, would rather die than go back into couples counseling, but if we’re going to continue this separated-but-living-together-under-the-same-roof arrangement, we’re going to have to be able to