Thank You for Last Wednesday

CJ Gall

HAVING BEEN MARRIED for more than two decades, I sometimes wonder about the choices other women make. Planning a road trip to set up our son and his roommate in their college apartment, my husband and I offer to give the roommate’s mother, Karen, a ride. Slim framed and plain faced, Karen wears a Harley t-shirt. She’s fifty-something and in the middle of a divorce, her second — a divorce hastened by her having found a new man. With the last of her boys out the door, I imagine Karen was hurtling down the interstate of life when she saw that final exit and yanked the wheel to the right.

Alone with Karen in the car while my husband pumps gas, I ask about her decision. She says her soon-to-be-ex calls her a “home wrecker” and a “slut.”

“Well, are you happy, ‘slut’?” I ask.

She smiles with satisfaction.

My husband climbs back in the car and tosses a bag of corn chips at me. “Here’s the snack you didn’t ask for, don’t want, and will later eat,” he says slyly. I punch him in the arm and tell him that if he was going to get me something I didn’t want, he could at least have gotten me Munchos.

Karen laughs at our banter. “You two are perfect together,” she says. “You’ll be married forever.”

That word forever flutters around the car, representing both a lifetime of togetherness and a life sentence. My husband taps his gold-banded finger on the steering wheel, and I feel simultaneous urges to hold his other hand tight and to open the door and run like hell. I open the corn chips instead. When I eat one, I see his eyebrow go up: his prediction was correct, confirming how well he knows me.

A month later I run into Karen and her new boyfriend at a dinner party. They are living together. They don’t even have a couch or a TV, she says, just two plates and a few kitchen items. Her ex-husband took everything. Later I catch myself staring at them pressed snugly together, feeding each other bites of food. What feels like envy lurches inside me, and I wonder how long the excitement of their new relationship will sustain them.

AT THE FARMERS’ MARKET I search for bananas that are only a little green: not so green that they leave a film on my teeth, but also not so ripe that they taste like candy. Just one more thing in life that has a limited window of perfection. The woman next to me palms an artichoke. She’s probably in her sixties, wears a linen blazer, and carries a designer purse. I want to ask her: Are you happy? I’d like to know, because in twenty years I will be her. I imagine she’s a woman who stayed in her marriage. No exit ramp for her. She has expensive clothes and hair that shines brighter than her years. At the holidays all her children return to one home, not splitting up between parents. There is a couch and a TV and plenty of plates at her house. She will not be eating cat food in her old age, because she has sacrificed romance for safety. She is a veteran of a war won. And she is the conquered, too.

I want to ask her how many times she contemplated taking the exit. Maybe never. Here she is with her manicured nails, her finger adorned with chunky diamonds few newlyweds could afford. I wonder if, like me, she weighs the well-worn life she knows against a tiny voice that challenges: So this is it?Crammed-in chats between running errands, getting to work, or ferrying the kids somewhere?I’m afraid that to speak aloud my secret longing for a life unchosen will make me a traitor. Is wondering about, or even wanting, something else a betrayal of what I have?

I am torn between becoming the artichoke shopper at the market and taking the last exit like Karen. The culture doesn’t seem to recognize this life stage in women. There’s too much talk about the “biological clock” and not enough talk about the other clocks ticking inside of us — and maybe inside of men, too, but I’m not a man, so that’s just speculation. It isn’t a lack of love. It is the reality of a “now” that will never again jolt you so hard that you’ll find owning a couch and a TV absurd.

It would be wonderful to know with certainty whether I’m a person who could live without a couch and a TV, but the question cannot be answered until the couch and the TV are no more. After the novelty wore off, would I be stuck asking myself why the hell I ever thought I could live like this? But if I never try it, will I — will my husband — be cheated of a life rich with reckless passion?

Falling in love is like single-mindedly performing a wholly unnecessary but wildly satisfying task, such as digging a large hole on the beach: Scraping out the sand and layers of shell until water wells up from some secret place below. The sun burning around the straps of my swimsuit like a branding iron.The hours on my hands and knees, chipping my fingernails, consumed by the desire to make the hole larger, to perfect its shape. Standing back, exhausted and spent, to admire an amazingly interesting hole, one that belongs to me.

Revisiting the hole the next day brings the realization that it was only temporary. Over the course of the night it did not so much fill in as erode, evaporate. Its elliptical shape diminished one grain at a time until the far wall weakened and collapsed. A wave came in and pushed the sand around. By morning the work of art has turned into a shallow depression. To keep it is to redig it every day, to commit to the work even when life deals me a thousand other tasks that demand my time.

Passion wraps us in its grip and creates a singular devotion, but it is perseverance that brings us before the hole the next day. It is perseverance that reveals the truth passion blinds us to: that every hole is filling in even as it’s being dug. And redigging the hole has to make way for vomiting kids, sports schedules, kitchen fires, dying parents. Wrung out and faced with the chore of digging again, we find it easier to shrug at the indentation in the sand.

I wasn’t prepared for this. Worse, the lack of conversation about it made me worry that I was alone, that something was wrong with me. Privately I wrestled with an unnameable yearning. Even now I vacillate between wanting something to sweep me into the storm of attraction again and an inexplicable compulsion to cling to this man who accepts my imperfections — sometimes with grace, sometimes with impatience. In my midthirties I would watch sad commercials about starving babies with flies on their faces and distended stomachs, and I’d think: Why can’t it be enough for me to have a decent income, to raise my kids, to go out to dinner sometimes and fall asleep in clean sheets to a TV on a timer? Isn’t this more than anyone deserves? Why should I want anything else?

The answer is unclear. I am both grateful for the life I have and drawn by the distant cry of Sirens. Passion seems like a pretty cashmere sweater with a thread caught on a limb, reminding me that if I walk away, there will be a great unraveling, leaving a hole of a different kind.

WHEN I’D BEEN MARRIED for four years, a new college graduate who’d joined our company’s engineering department came to my office to tell me he was planning to propose to his girlfriend. “You’ve been married a long time,” he said, because when you are twenty-three, four years seems like a long time. “What’s your secret?”

“Credit-card debt,” I answered, “followed by mortgage debt, followed by kids.” By the time he and his wife were able to separate, I told him, they’d be like two old war enemies stranded on a desert island.

“That’s depressing,” he replied.

Then I gave him the most critical advice I could give: that he should marry someone he could divorce with civility, someone who would muscle past the hurt and want him to have happiness, too. Marry someone for whom he would wish the same. “Do that,” I said, “and, whatever the outcome is, you’ll have a pretty decent run.”

“What about love?” he wanted to know.

“Love is not enough,” I said. “Take my word for that.”

The following week I took a business trip to Atlanta. Since my husband and I were working on our new house, I’d made copious lists for him of what needed to be done while I was away: The sod was being delivered and had to be laid before I got back. The tile man was coming to work on the guest bathroom. The builder needed to be reminded to remove a Port-A-Potty from the adjoining property. I gave my husband names, numbers, instructions.

In Atlanta I sat waiting for my client in a large conference room. He arrived with a team of co-workers. As he introduced the team’s accountant, I couldn’t speak. It was Peter. I had not seen or spoken to him since I’d ended our relationship years earlier. I’d left him crying in the parking lot of a bar.

Peter and I shook hands and traded furtive glances. Later he caught up with me at the elevator and asked if we could have dinner or drinks. “Please,” he said. I agreed.

I didn’t have a rental car, so Peter picked me up from my hotel. We went to an open-air cantina, where he drank a lot of beer and I picked at my tacos. Peter told me about his job and his girlfriend. He surprised me by rolling down the waistband of his shorts almost to his pubic hair to show me his new tattoo: an infinity symbol. Strait-laced, salutatorian, never-colors-outside-the-lines Peter had a tattoo.

He drove me back to the hotel, though he probably should not have been driving at all. On the way he took my hand in his and asked, “Is there any chance?”

I reminded him that I was married.He said he’d just wondered.

I stared out the window, feeling the heat of Peter’s hand. Finally I said, “I love him, Peter. I married him, and I love him.”

For a while Peter said nothing. Then he squeezed my hand and said, “You loved me.”

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t pull my hand away. I had loved Peter, and maybe a part of me always would.

After we arrived at the hotel, Peter came around to open my door. How long had it been since a man had opened a car door for me? I stepped out, and he hugged me, putting his chin on my head, as he often had during the two years we’d been together. He wanted to come up to my room, but I said no. Then he kissed me on the mouth in a way that made me feel both free and scared. I backed away, but not as fast as I should have. He apologized and climbed into his car and waved to me as he drove off.

I went to my room and called my husband. I needed to hear his voice, to be reminded of what we had. When he answered the phone, he sounded distracted. An episode of The X-Files was playing in the background. He’d forgotten about the sod and the tile man. He’d left the whole list, every meticulous instruction I’d crafted, at the office. Then he said, “Honey, I have to go. We can talk about this tomorrow. I’m exhausted.”

When Peter called my cellphone an hour later, I let voice mail pick it up. I was afraid to answer.

I thought back to a moment when Peter and I were eighteen and sitting on a dock in the bright sun. Peter, the boy I had once loved so much it had made my chest ache, was holding my hand. The ice-cream conewe’d bought to share was melting, dripping milky drops into the river below. I lit a cigarette.

“I wish you’d quit smoking,” he said quietly.

I pitched the cigarette into the river and tipped the soggy cone in, too. A swarm of fish rose to nibble at it.

I told him I was late. As in, possibly pregnant. I asked what he wanted to do if I was.

He did not smile or laugh or cry. He did not drape his arm around me and pull me to him, the way he usually did when things were tough. The look on his face said, I’m screwed.

“I’ll do whatever you want to do,” he said.

Wrong answer. I pulled out another cigarette but didn’t light it. The ice-cream cone had drifted away.

“Say something, please,” he said.

I held the fresh cigarette between my finger and thumb, then told him I was quitting.

He half smiled. “I’m glad.”

Then I lit the cigarette and walked away.

Distance helps us to accept even the worst transgressions. Time allows forgiveness that’s difficult to grant to the people we confront day in and day out. Spending that much time together forces you to climb the mountain of each other’s faults over and over. Do I still love Peter? Yes, but only because the relationship ended. My love for him was never tried or tested or beaten up by day-to-day living. I didn’t have to get up every morning and fight with him over the children or money or who’d put the empty milk container back in the fridge. My love for Peter is pure because it’s protected from the elements of familiarity, frustration, and time. But it’s not a durable love. If unfettered from the amber that trapped it so long ago, it would soon begin to deteriorate. I never had to learn how to love Peter through weeks or months when I hated him. For me he is forever a boy in the sun on a dock with ice cream on his fingers.