A Cup of Comfort for Couples (11 page)

“Here's your writing studio,” my husband said, as he took one flower out of the vase and handed it to me. “You know I love you.” He looked so shy, as if wondering about his skills as an interior decorator.

My eyes filled with tears, and I let myself be gathered into his warm, strong carpenter arms. “I love you too,” I said. “And I've missed you so much.”

Of course, the sun didn't shine every day after that, and fireworks didn't go off every evening. I filled up the bookshelves in no time. We had a lot of talks and started to figure out how we could both have our retirement dreams met, and then we talked some more.

After the hydrangea blossoms dried, I kept them on my desk so I could remember their beauty and the love they represented. And I'm writing.

—
Mary E. Winter

Diving for Love

T
hirty years ago when David and I took off for our honeymoon to Hawaii, we carried a lot of baggage. We took just a few suitcases with some light clothing, bathing suits, and sunscreen, but we had plenty of emotional baggage. It was the second marriage for both of us. We'd fallen madly in love a few years before, spent a year in passionate romantic bliss, then a year arguing just as passionately to work out the kinks, and after six months of living together amicably, we were ready to get married.

Three days before the wedding, David brought me to his lawyer's office to sign a prenuptial agreement. Because his first marriage had lasted only a few years, he wanted to be sure, in case ours failed, that he'd keep the house he now owned. I was crushed. Didn't he have faith in our love? But something in me told me to go ahead with the wedding on blind faith. The ceremony was beautiful, the wedding a dream, but on the airplane heading for Hawaii the next morning, I was fighting off tears.

When we stepped off the plane in Kauai, the warm breeze was so playful and erotic that I put aside the baggage and inhaled. Then exhaled, softer.
Yes
. That afternoon we wandered on a beach where hot water gushed up from crevices, bursting every few minutes like warm body fluids. David picked a blood-red flower and braided it into my hair. We had landed in the land of hot love; no broken hearts allowed. The rhythm of the islands enveloped us like new, sweet skin.

In the next days, we danced in yellow moonlight, crooned with ukuleles, sucked on mangos, made slow love, snorkeled on red reefs, and swam with purple fishes. On the fifth day, we decided to venture deeper into the ocean. Instead of spending months getting certified to scuba dive, tourists in Hawaii can take a two-hour group lesson and then dive thirty feet below the ocean's surface with instructors. We were island adventurers, drenched in warm passion and smothered in fragrant leis, so we signed up to swim into the underworld.

The first hour of instruction included a comprehensive list of every possible death under the sea. The second hour squeaked with rubber suits, breathing apparatus, and stark fear. In the heavy wetsuit, my loose, hula-dancing body became stiff and awkward. My swim fins slapped hard on the training deck, jutting out at sharp angles when I tried to walk. The metal tank strapped to my back was leaden, and the flimsy mouth tube my only life-line.
Place the rubber nozzle in your mouth and breathe
slowly. Do not inhale sharply. In and out slowly, naturally
. I envisioned myself at the bottom of the ocean, unable to breathe, the tube floating out of my reach.
Place the mask over your eyes and push firmly to seal. If
your vision clouds, tip your head back slightly, and push
the seal up and down to let excess water escape.
I imagined my vision clouding as the water rushed into my lungs, my arms flailing, eyes bulging, as I watched one last purple fish float by.

David was grinning as he pulled the apparatus in and out of his mouth, walking easy, tall and lanky in his slick wetsuit — Lloyd Bridges ready for
Sea Hunt
. I breathed into my air hose,
shlshhshhlsh
, and out,
phshhshshhh
, peering closely at the gauge on my tank
.
When your gauge goes down to less than one hundred,
wave your arms at an instructor. The person whose
gauge goes down to one hundred first must signal immediately,
and we will all return to the surface. Breathe in
slowly, shlshhshhls, breathe out calmly, phshhshshhh.
I began to shiver uncontrollably.

David slipped off his mask and walked closer. “What's the matter?”

“I'm terrified.” The shivers had become spasms; my knees were buckling.

“I thought you wanted to do this.” David put his arms around me to steady me, reached behind and loos-ened my mask, then pulled me over to sit on a bench. “Wasn't this your idea, honey?” He was peering at me curiously, as if he'd never met this quivering creature.

“Yes, I do want to do it. I just forgot that I get terrified if I can't breathe.”

“Since when?”

“Since this scuba diving lesson.”

“Should we forget it, and do something else?”

“No. After all the time to put on this stuff, I want to at least enjoy the view under the water.

A few minutes later I steeled myself as we plunged into the water. My eyes glared frozen from behind my mask, while bubbles drifted up with each breath: in
shlshlshsh
, out
phshshshsh
, bubble, bubble; in
shlshlshh
, out
phsshshsh
, bubble, bubble. I tried to swim, but I couldn't get my legs to unfurl and my arms flapped at my sides, like turtle fins. The instructor floated by me, gesturing. She pointed to my curled knees, then to her own legs, which she waved in an exaggerated mermaid swish. I tried a swish or two, but then snapped back to fetal position. Breathe in
shslshshlsh
, breathe out,
pshshhshsh
, bubble, bubble.

David was somewhere in the drift of divers floating in strange, ghostly bubbles. I searched for his face behind the masks, but my own mask was beginning to get cloudy.
If your vision clouds, tip your head back
slightly, and push the seal up and down to let excess
water escape
. I tipped my head back, then pushed the seal up and down as carefully as I could. When the mask filled with saltwater, I panicked. Though I waved my arms wildly to get an instructor's attention, no one came, so I headed for the surface, alone.
Push up, breathe in,
shlshhshshh,
push harder, kick,
breathe out,
phshshshsh,
reach up, splash out
.

When I surfaced, I pulled the mask off my face and blinked. With one hand I rubbed my eyes while my other hand let go of the mask, which drifted slowly to the bottom as I tread water to stay afloat. The shore looked a long way off.

An instructor splashed up next to me. “What's going on?”

“My mask was filling with water and I couldn't clear it.” My voice sounded hollow and gurgly, as if filled with bubbles and salt.

“Where is your mask?”

“I think I dropped it.”

She nodded, and for a long time we tread water.

“Okay,” she said, “I'll go down for it. You stay right here.”

You can think about a lot of things when you're treading water in the middle of the ocean, like how far away the dock is, and whether your mask will ever be found, and how long you can tread water, and whether a shark could bite your legs off, and whether a fish could carry your mask home to his fish family, and where is your husband, and what could he be thinking when he doesn't see you on the bottom of the ocean?

The instructor burst up, waving the mask above her head. She helped me seal it carefully around my face. “Don't wiggle it. Just leave it on,” she warned. Then she took my hand and led me firmly back underwater.

In the eerie slanted sunlight I made out David's long, thin shape apart from the other divers. He looked lost, darting around, swimming in half-circles. When he saw us coming, he swam up, his eyes bulging behind his mask. The instructor pointed to my hand, then to David's, and placed my hand carefully in his. She pointed to both our hands, then clasped her own hands together and waved them in front of David's face.
Hold on to her.

David nodded and signaled thumbs-up with his free hand. He would not let go. He held my hand so firmly, in fact, that I let my legs uncurl just a little, trying a mermaid swish here and there, swimming next to him, holding on. David pointed to his chest, then his air hose, and back to me. He breathed in,
shlshlshsh
, and I matched his breathing, then out, slowly,
pshshshsh
; we breathed together. He nodded and we swam off, a two-headed mermaid, breathing in rhythm.

David pointed out a neon parrotfish, then he led me to a little cave and showed me a glowing eel under a rock.
Breathe in together, breathe out together.
Swish fins.
It was kind of glorious deep under the sea.

When we emerged, the light was fading but the air was still warm and fragrant. After peeling off our wetsuits, we sat on a bench, leaning into each other, grinning.

The instructor walked over to check on me. “Diving is scarier for women,” she said. I looked puzzled. “Because we bear children,” she explained.

Rachel was born nine months and three days later. Five months into the pregnancy, when I felt her kicking inside me, I sat David down and placed his hand on my stomach. We sat in silence for a few moments, just the three of us.

Finally I said, “I'm having our child and I need you to put my name on the deed to our home.”

Two days later a new deed was issued, and the prenuptial agreement was torn up.

Ari, our son, came three years after.

Now, thirty years and one grandchild later, David and I swim along, drift apart, surface, then dive deeper. We're still holding hands.

—
Debra Gordon Zaslow

Biscuits and Olives

I
t was Greg's idea to spend our thirteenth wedding anniversary on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, just thirty minutes west of our home in the suburbs. I was living on Queen Anne when we met, and years before that Greg had lived there as a college student. He thought it would be romantic to visit the place where we began, the place we'd both left behind.

We stayed at the Marqueen Hotel, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century brick building at the bottom of the hill that had housed apartments for most of its life. The Marqueen isn't plush and new like the tiny boutique hotels downtown; it's large and old-world homey, furnished with vintage décor and antique furniture. If the water ran from hot to cold and back again without any notice, we were willing to trade that inconvenience for a slice of the character we had both loved when we were younger, before the promises of greater safety, bigger back yards, and better schools for our children lured us to the suburbs.

We did everything we wanted that weekend, things we'd all but given up since becoming parents. We ate each meal at a different restaurant, ordering exotic dishes of pheasant eggs and lemongrass soup, curried mussels and dilled crab cakes. We hopped from bar to bar, drinking too many Lemon Drops and dancing to technoretro music, convincing ourselves that the dark lighting and our penchant for dressing young kept the other dancers from noticing that we were “too old.” We spent an afternoon at Pike Place Market, where we felt, almost, like tourists. We bought used books at Twice Sold Tales, which we read while lounging naked in our room until desire drew us away from the pages and into each other's arms.

“Do you miss it?” Greg asked at one point.

I knew he was talking about more than just the neighborhood and city, that he was really asking whether I missed being young and childless and unfettered, with all of my choices still in front of me.

“It's a good question,” I said. “Do you have a lifetime?”

“As a matter of fact,” he laughed, “I do.”

After we had our fill of downtown, we went up the hill — to Kerry Park, for its famous view that spans from downtown to Alki Point, and to the Queen Anne Café, a diner we used to lounge in over long Sunday breakfasts. Our last stop was the back stoop of my old apartment building, where, fifteen years before, we had shared our first kiss, after hours of soul-meeting talk about music and books and philosophy, important things that would come to seem like mere luxuries in the busy years ahead.