The Narrow Door (16 page)

2010 | 
I’m in the backyard in the house in Springs. The day has an odd turbulence about it, ever since I’ve picked up M from the train station the night before. Maybe I am angry with him for sleeping through his alarm clock and missing the 9 a.m. jitney. We were supposed to have lunch together, and I’d been looking forward to that lunch after a couple of intense days of writing. Instead, he will come in at five today on the busiest train of the season, the Fourth of July train, people practically standing on one another’s feet, all the things people do when good manners break down. And he will be battered from it.

We walk into the house. Texts come into his phone with a frequency I find unnerving, because he never says what they are, who they’re from. I wish he’d turn off the sound. Not that I expect him to tell me who it is. One thing we’ve tried to do in our fifteen years together is to give each other space, but the combination of secrecy and right-in-my-faceness is enough to make the hairs on my arms stand on end. I constrict from inside. His freneticism is making me frenetic, and to center myself, I go to the side yard to clean out the birdbath. There’s a scum inside the dish. It’s the color of raisins, but it’s ugly and foul, and I don’t like to think of the birds dipping their wings in that water. The week has been hot, brutally so. The air is still. It hasn’t rained in so long and the birds really need to drink and clean themselves. There are no pools or puddles of standing water anywhere.

Then M comes up to me from behind. He puts his arm around me. It’s part loving, part holding me in place, as if by executing that gesture, he’s holding himself in place. I feel a little locked down, as if I’m being gently punished for some infraction. I wonder what I’ve done. “What?” he says.

“What do you mean, what?” I say. I look out at the garden. Though it’s the height of summer, the plants look brown to me.

“What?” he says again, this time with more emphasis.

“Honey?” I want to turn around. It seems to me that if I could see his face just now, I wouldn’t feel like falling down into his arms.

“I think you’re mad at me,” he says. And just the sound of those words. Oh, deep chasm: I feel the grass underneath my feet about to open up a trapdoor.

“I don’t know. You’re acting—you’re not acting like yourself. I don’t—” Full sentences are impossible. They are houses I don’t have it in me to build. “What’s going on? Are you seeing someone?”

It’s a relief to say it, as hard as it is to say it. But it’s also standing inside someone else’s narrative, a TV narrative, a politician’s narrative. Our relationship has always been open, but open has meant a couple of hours—and anonymity. Not an overnight stay and certainly not a boyfriend.

Some boundary is being kicked down here.

The tears burst the dam, though the tears aren’t mine. They’re M’s. Is that what happens in any relationship, healthy or not? One cries the tears of the two. One stands ground for the both of them, but it is odd for me to be playing the tearless one. The last time I played the tearless role was at our wedding, in a salt marsh on Cape Cod, two years ago, when I read him a passage from “Song of Myself.” I was astonished to see him cry in front of the minister. I’d been expecting to break down myself—that’s the way I’d been imagining it in my head for months. But I spoke those words calmly as if Walt Whitman had entered me, and there I was, grateful to be released from my old role for that little while.

M continues to cry. I’m aware of the odd magnetizing force of baritone weeping—how often do we ever hear it? It has an animal pull. I imagine ears turning toward it in all the houses around us. I look over toward our neighbors’ fence and instinctively pull him by the hand toward the back door.

The two of us are seated in the living room. The story is this: He has met someone. His thing with the someone has been going on, what—three meetings? They have met in the apartment in the city. They have spent the night in the city. M needs to tell me all this, because it is too much to hold it back. By coming clean about it he can begin again.

There are no plans to get rid of the someone.

And, if I’m to understand it correctly, there are no plans to get rid of me.

He says that some joy has been lost in our relationship over the past two years, though this comes as news to me. I have been relatively okay. In spite of my mother’s illness and death, in spite of Denise’s illness and death, I’ve been going forward, doing my work, teaching, getting better ever since that outbreak of shingles. What have I not been seeing? What have I not been doing? Has my own grief—the gauzy thickness of it—kept me from seeing him? Has my darkness poisoned him? The other person is forty-two. He lives in another part of Long Island. He is someone with whom he needs to have sex right now. New sex, he says, versus married sex. I get that, at least in theory. The energizing touch of another creature, a new face, a different body, a bigger chest, a furrier body, thicker hard legs, another smell, eyes of a different color. Just for that moment, I can see past myself, my own disappointment, hurt, jealousy, and rage, to the man ahead of me, the man who isn’t my husband just this minute, but someone in trouble.

Maybe this guy will help him. Will take care of him in ways I can’t take care of him.

Maybe this guy will help us. I have never thought we needed help, but maybe we do. I don’t know anything.

And besides, we’re talking about one overnight a week, right? I can do that.

I think?

Somewhere in the ghost of my imagination I think of all the figures in books and movies to whom I attach the word “accommodator.” Oh, how we loathe those people, so attuned to what they think is right, to misguided notions of loyalty and attachment, that they can’t even see how they’re complicit. Let’s think of them, let’s make a list.

Am I overemphasizing my role in this so I don’t have to feel the wound of it?

Is this overemphasis just another defense?

“He’s such a gift to me,” he says, crying and crying again as he looks at my face. “I don’t know why it hurts to say that to you.”

Maybe because you want it to hurt, I think. You want to slide that knife into my side with kindness on your face. But I’m in a place beyond hurting right now—the defenses are at attention. Did he think I’d crumble and shrivel? Can’t he see me past the movie he’s projected onto me?

“This wasn’t a choice,” M says, after he’s recovered himself. And the conviction behind that, the openness of his face, is enough to scare me like I’ve never been scared before.

“You can write about this,” he adds.

But I don’t want this in my book! I want to cry.

2006 | 
Halloween has usually been a time to batten down the hatches in our New York apartment. The sidewalks crowd with people from out of town, the police barricade the streets, and for a little while, West Sixteenth Street is Bourbon Street. I suppose it is fun to have Bourbon Street out your window, but yelling and clamor are no fun unless you’re with someone. M is away this year, which makes me miss last year, when we walked down the streets with black horns affixed to our heads. The night was warm, October sliding back into summertime. It was the year in which I had a long pointy beard and a photographer from the
Post
seemed to think we’d make a most interesting picture.

So no better time to get out of town, to propose a weekend with Denise. She hasn’t yet seen our new second house on Fire Island, and I’m eager to have her come visit. Just the two of us.

Denise loves this idea,
loves
it. She writes me about the visit for days. She asks what to bring; she must have her coffee, she says. She must have her beans; she must have her coffee pot. Of course, I say, of course. Bring your whole wardrobe. Bring anything you want to bring.

I stand among the small crowd at the foot of the ferry dock in the October chill, watching the men in their coats—these men are older than the men of summer, homeowners rather than renters—streaming toward us. Men look past us toward other men, and they perform their greetings. It’s true of us, whoever we are: we want to look popular, we want to seem loved, and we want to love back. Then there’s Denise who catches sight of me as she steps off the boat. She has high heels on. (High heels on those boardwalks: Denise!) And her big grin, which she hides a bit by dipping her head, a characteristic gesture, as if she knows from experience that it could be dangerous to beam out that grin too freely.

We hug. We laugh. Suddenly no one else exists but us, and we walk down the boardwalk, past the pines, past deer, past bamboo, past the puddles in the sand of Fire Island Boulevard, as if there had never been that night in that North Carolina beach house, as if there had never been anything to get in the way of our affection and ease.

She loves the house. She loves the windows open to the holly trees and birches, the white walls, the spare furniture, the clerestories facing west. There’s an extra poignancy to this time of year, just as the leaves color, the season drawing to a close. Soon the ferry schedule will dwindle to two boats a day, then only on weekends, provided Great South Bay doesn’t freeze over. The water will be shut off, and if we do come out, say, on the third weekend of December, we’ll have to cart the water in jugs and pee outside.

We have three days. We talk about work, as usual: the colleagues and friends who drive Denise nuts. We walk down the boardwalks and point to houses we like. Interestingly, Denise points to the single, traditional Cape Cod house among the hundreds of modern houses as her favorite, which puzzles me, but not enough to ask her about it, to make a big deal out of it. I don’t know what she sees in that house that she doesn’t see in the sleek wooden boxes surrounding it. We walk on the beach and look out at the cold, hard sea. I even tell her I’m going to write for two hours every day, which I do. I close the bedroom door, perch my laptop on my legs, and push a new novel just a few sentences ahead into the next scene, into time. It feels like an achievement to ask for this time alone, even though she’s just a few feet on the other side of the wall. I’m still prone to her big shimmering aura, but I need some space of my own. It will be good for me, I tell her. It will be good for you. So we honor the plan. I write, while she sits curled up on her bed, in the stream of the heating vent, marking up student stories in red.

The best thing, though: we cook. Or at least I initiate the cooking. I’m not sure Denise knows how little I know about cooking, but I fake it as if my life depended on it, the way I faked typing with ten fingers rather than two, and did it instantly when I worked as a technical writer in my twenties. I cut tomatoes and peppers for the salad. She stirs the sauce on the stove. And soon our cooking is a fifty-fifty thing, and the fact that we can move, without bumping or getting in each other’s way, seems like a beautiful thing. Denise sways side to side, then back and forth, holding up a hand as the music plays on the sound system. She’ll talk about this night until the end of her life, not about the food we made, not exactly. That wasn’t the point. The point was that we cooked together, and there was no better sign, for her at least, of two people’s connection.

M writes and calls from Houston to see how we’re doing. He is glad we’re having a good time. I am happy to hear from him, even though the weekend is only about Denise and me. Our time, our space—we haven’t had much time alone since the earliest days of our friendship. Always another boyfriend, partner, husband, friend to pull one of us away from the other.

On Sunday morning a windstorm slams up the coast. No rain, but the gusts shake the house on its posts. They whistle through the sliding glass window frames; they tear leaves from birches, holly, sassafras, shadbush. And that strange sound from outside: is that really the sound of the ocean from a block away? Denise packs—her coffee, her coffee pot, her papers, her clothes: all of it pushed inside her suitcase. She pulls the rolling suitcase down the boardwalk to the ferry; I walk beside her. We lower our heads and use the tops of our heads to push forward into that wind, to stop the sand from blowing in our eyes. A trash can lid lifts up and flies onto the boardwalk and miraculously flies back onto the can, just missing us. A doe leaps across the boardwalk as if looking for a place to cover herself. And just when we think it couldn’t get any windier, it does get windier. Here we are, the two of us, walking west through what appears to be a hurricane so harsh it doesn’t have moisture.

Yet no one’s waiting for the boat to pull in to the dock.
All morning ferries canceled
, says a guy standing under the shelter. I can’t but take in the concern in Denise’s eyes, the pulling in of her lips. I must have some version of that look on my face, too. We’ve been so good, we’ve had the ideal weekend, the weekend that took back, reversed, retrieved the awful weekend in North Carolina. We’ve engraved a shape. We’ve built a story we’ll want to remember, and now we’re left with time on our hands, an endless coda to the song that will probably go on and on till it wears out its welcome. Imagine all those great songs from the sixties ruined by the fucking coda that will not stop.

We walk back to the house uneasily. Surely Denise will explode at any minute. She can feel it, I can feel it, and I don’t see how we’re going to deal with that eruption out on this desert island, even though Islip, Long Island, is in sight across the bay.

We walk back to the house. The pine boughs thrash. The backs of our necks are cold. We try to mask our disappointment from each other. We go in the house, sit in the living room. We pitch ourselves on the edge of the couch, wary of giving ourselves over to the cushions, cautious of settling in.

Three hours later the boats are running. Good-bye to our tense afternoon, good-bye to the perfect weekend that preceded it, good-bye to the dry hurricane, which has since moved eastward to Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, and in the process scrubbed the wood siding on the houses clean. We’re standing in winter now. Even the air has a cleansed bite to it.

We hug each other, completely unguarded now. We look into each other’s face. We kiss each other, not aiming for the cheek, as we usually do, but for the mouth. I watch her walk on the boat, which is alarmingly overcrowded, enough passengers and cargo for five boats—people standing inside, people standing shoulder to shoulder. I don’t see how that ferry will make it across the choppy bay without taking on water through its openings. She waves as she steps inside, that big grin turned to me once again. Then I can’t see her anymore through the fog on the windows. An hour later she sends a text.
I’m on the train back to the city. I sat between two great big guys on the boat, they were so nice to me. Thank you so much for the perfect weekend.