“That’s not my question to answer,” she says after a beat. “That’s yours.”
The last word
that Liv had asked me to explore in our free association exercise, to throw whatever thoughts against the wall, was
love,
and for reasons that I still can’t explain several hours later when
Peter has come through the door, I answered, “Beige.” And then I started laughing—cackling really, because “beige,” in the context of love, makes absolutely no sense. Until Liv let the air hover between us, silence clinging to the walls in the living room, and suddenly it made too much sense, and then gobsmacked me like a tsunami of depression that “beige” is how I would describe love.
Once I started to cry, really, really purging my guts out bawling, Liv interjected, offering me a tissue and asking what about my answer had made me so very sad.
I couldn’t finger it exactly, what it was. The Beatles were still stuck in my head, and I couldn’t shake those lyrics, the melody running through me like my own blood. So I told her that I had a sense of emotional memory, as silly as that sounded. She assured me that it didn’t sound silly at all, but all the same, I felt self-conscious about how pretentious I sounded until she urged me to continue. That she wouldn’t judge me. I thought of her in the dog run and that maybe we would have been friends in another life, so I told her.
I told her about how when I think of Peter, and then, when I really focused and thought about my dad, what struck me most was the general ambivalence that rises up within me. That I can’t remember a single anecdote about my father, and yet still, in my core, there is this beigeness.
For lack of a better word,
I said, and she nodded because she got it.
Like something has been cut out, like I’m not allowed to feel anything, so I choose to feel indifference.
“I’d like to feel red,” I said, and her forehead wrinkled. “What I mean is, I’d like for my first association with love—whether with my husband or with my father—to be passionate, fulfilled. That should be part of my promise to be this new self.”
“Love ebbs and flows,” she said. “There can’t be hot without being cold.”
“I know that. Of course, I mean, I know that.”
“But marriages do survive affairs,” she counseled. “It’s a question of forgiveness from one party and repentance from the other.”
“But that’s just it,” I said. “The forgiveness part is both easy and hard—I can’t remember what he did, other than what he’s told me. And yet, I also have no history on which to rely to give me the faith to keep going.”
“So how about you stop analyzing it?” She shifted in the armchair.
“Stop analyzing it? I’m an analyzer: that’s what everyone says. I can’t stop. That’s what I do.”
“But you’ve admitted you want to
be
different, so why not try a different tactic?”
“Like…just…what? Living it?”
“Well, why not?” She shrugged, though I knew this wasn’t a casual suggestion. “Why not—for one week—just try to live day to day and see how you feel about that, see if it jars anything for you, and see if, for lack of a better word, as you said, it helps distill this beigeness.”
“It seems too easy.”
“It won’t be the cure,” she promised. “But for this particular aspect of your recovery, it may be helpful to tap into your emotional well, to see if we can get past the wall of ambivalence.”
“Like that might then trigger something else?”
“Like, in the spirit of living in the moment, that might at least give you a different answer when I ask you about love next week.”
“Small steps,” I said.
“Small steps,” she said. “Let’s learn to walk before we can run.”
13
B
y Friday, I have lived in enough moments that my brain has almost stopped its endless flurry of splintering feedback. Liv prescribed a sleeping pill that has helped smooth those sharp edges, and for four nights I have fallen deeply into slumber, unable to remember my dreams the next morning. I’m well rested in a way that I haven’t been since the accident. I press back my irritation when my mother sends me a yoga mat and homemade gluten-free cookies via FedEx, manage a mostly cheery response when Samantha hesitantly shares the news of a friend’s impending baby shower, abort a malignant thought when Peter’s text-message alert goes off while he’s standing in the kitchen—the idea of
Ginger
fleeing as quickly as it comes. By Labor Day weekend—nearly a month since I’ve been back home—I’m surprised at how easily I have taken to it: shoving it all aside and simply
being,
how it might actually be a choice: to embrace a different color in the spectrum of the rainbow.
Liv and my doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital have given me the go-ahead for sex.
“Anatomically,” Dr. Hewitt, head of my new team tells me, “you’re A-OK.” Like she’s a pediatrician, and I’ve beaten a case of the sniffles. “If you’d like to engage with your husband, you won’t do yourself any harm.”
“Psychologically,” Liv said before she left on Tuesday, “it might be a positive step in the right direction for you guys to reconnect—though only if that feels right. There’s no rush.”
Tonight, with the long holiday weekend stretched out in front of us, Peter drops his messenger bag by the door, kisses me hello on the couch, then moves to the fridge where he is, no doubt, cracking open a beer. He has told me that in the Labor Days past, we’d retreat to the Hamptons—a gallery client would almost inevitably offer up a room in their weekend house. But this year, we’re trapped, stuck, as I’m not ready for a trek, even if that trek is to a well-appointed six-bedroom with a view of the Atlantic. Peter doesn’t seem to mind that we’re one of the last few remaining in the city, and tries to make our three-day respite, three days of forced togetherness, sound like fun, an adventure. “We can go through all of our CDs and make, like, our own personal concert,” he said last night. “Turn off the lights. Turn the living room into a Pink Floyd laser show.” I didn’t get the reference but I appreciated the effort all the same.
“Hey, come join me on the couch,” I say to Peter tonight, pausing my iPod, slipping it onto the coffee table. I’ve been sitting here for I don’t know how long, lost in the music, living in the moment. And though this new tactic requires that I just
be
—just inhale and exhale and let life wash over me—the music, well, the music makes me itch, makes me once again try to wind my brain into the past, straddling the space between the past and memory. Discover the moments when I first heard these lyrics, first absorbed the melodies, and thought that something about them might change my life. That
when Peter and I trucked out to Jones Beach to see the Counting Crows on a sticky July night for our fourth date, the night, he’s told me, he decided he was in love with me because I knew every word to “A Murder of One,” well, maybe I was already in love with him back. Maybe I was so heady in love with him that he was all I thought about—work and art and my dad and all the rest of it be damned. It was easy to imagine these things, after all, when who knows if they could have been true.
Peter grabs a handful of Cookie Crisp cereal from the open box on the counter, pops a few pieces in his mouth, and sinks down next to me on the gilded, hideous sofa, still chewing. He plops the beer on top of a magazine on the coffee table.
“What’s up?” he says. “How was your day?”
“Boring. Went by too slowly. Went by too quickly. All of the above. Same story, different day. Next week, once I’ve been cleared to get out of here, really, like get out of here—back to the living world, my first stop is a new wardrobe. Second stop—new couch.”
“I already know what’s wrong with the couch. But what’s wrong with your wardrobe?”
“Too boring, too beige.” It’s all goddamn neutrals is what it is. Where is the
red
that the fabulous me should be wearing?
“And you’ll go back to the gallery soon,” he says, eating the last of the cereal. “That will break up the monotony.”
I nod, hopeful that he is right, doubtful that he is right all the same. But I resolve to
live in the moment!
and so I smile at him, stifling the urge to say that it’s not just the
monotony, idiot! It’s the void that is the blank space and the monotony is just the effect, not the cause!
No, I set that aside, and evaporate it from my mind, and there it goes, gone.
Here on the couch, Peter still feels too big for me, just like he did
the first time I saw him in the hospital room, but I’ve grown used to his meatiness now. Now, his oversize hands and biceps shaped like barrels, well, now they’re starting to provide comfort, a sign of safety. He’s my shelter in my storm, my near-literal shelter. If I tucked myself under him, yes—I’ve almost convinced myself—I might be able to survive all of this, weather whatever comes next on the horizon.
I take one of his hulklike palms and press it against my cheek. He stops chewing, surprised, assessing the situation, and wipes his free hand, unconsciously, on his jeans.
“Tell me something wonderful about us,” I say. I ask this of him every once in a while, use him to recount the past, and then I’ll roll it around in my brain and dish it back to Jamie, who sometimes aims the camera on me, sometimes just listens. Sometimes, I’ll add in tiny details upon regurgitation, slivers of information that come to me without warning, but most of the time I’m simply an echo of that which was fed to me. Though Rory has changed her mind thanks to the publicity bump for the gallery, my mom remains stalwartly against
American Profiles,
but she doesn’t get it—she doesn’t see that it’s cathartic for me to put this stuff down on record. If I don’t, what else might get lost or might evaporate with no warning at all, like it did the first time around? And she doesn’t know, of course, that Jamie is going to get me the answers that she refuses to. Besides, I stopped listening to my mom after I found the painting of the white house, the one we both remembered but the one that she pretended not to.
His house for the other half of his life.
Now, I’m living in the moment by ignoring her.
“What do you want to hear?” Peter says, keeping his palm in place. He seems nervous now, senses that this might lead somewhere different than the prior conversations have.
“Anything,” I say, then lean back against the velvet and gingerly swing my legs up into his lap. “Tell me anything wonderful about who we used to be.”
He hesitates, waiting to home in on the perfect answer to my loaded invitation.
“Two months after we started dating, we—on a whim—flew to Paris for the weekend,” he says, his face morphing into a smile. “I’d never been. You insisted on taking me, showing me the town.”
“Why haven’t you told me this before?” I ask, then close my eyes to see if I could recall any of it. The Eiffel Tower, the Seine, the sidewalk cafés with their fresh brie and their gluttonous, lingering lunches.
“To be honest, I just remembered. It was early on, and”—he shrugs—“I don’t know. You forget things.” I nod because you sure as hell do, and he continues.
“Anyway, I was nervous to fly there—there was a terrorism scare going on, so we splurged and went first class. Oh my god, we drank so much wine on the plane—and got these little toiletry sets that I think might still be stuffed in the bathroom cabinet—and by the time we got there, we were both hungover. But happy and on a high while hungover all the same—the good sort of drunk, you know? So we go there, and you insisted on blowing our budget by staying at the George V.”
“What’s the George V?”
“The nicest hotel in the city—like, super, super nice.”
“How’d we afford that?”
“Er, you have money. Your mom didn’t tell you this? I told her to tell you.”
I shake my head no. God knows what else my mom hasn’t told me.
“Well, yeah, you have a trust your dad set up for you before he,
um, left. You never,
ever
touch it—the only exception was when you started the gallery. But for this trip, you said it was worth it. That you never do anything for yourself, and you wanted to go all out.” He shrugs. “You were so excited about it that I wasn’t going to stop you. If I’d been paying, we would have been at some fifty-buck-a-night fleabag, so…yeah.”
“So this place was decadent?” I try to picture it: maid service, six-hundred-thread-count sheets, late-night deliveries of chocolates and champagne. The new me very much approves.
“For some perspective, we were on the same floor as Hugh Grant.” He laughs, so I do, too. We’d watched
Notting Hill
last weekend, so I at least get the reference. “You kept trying to pretend that you weren’t stalking him, but you were totally stalking him, until we were in the same elevator with him, and you finally introduced yourself, and he was very polite and kind considering that we could see the hives that had broken out on your neck from nerves.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say, though I’m smiling and I do kind of believe him.
“Don’t believe it all you want,” he says. “My hand is to God.”
“I don’t seem like the freak-out-upon-celebrity-sighting type.”
“You were a big
Four Weddings and a Funeral
fan.”
“I’ll have to watch it,” I say, distracted from the story for a moment, remembering just how little I indeed remember. “Okay, keep going.”
“So we spent all three days trekking from one museum to the next—the Louvre, the D’Orsay, the Orange Museum.”
“The Orange Museum?”
“That’s what I called it—I don’t speak French, so I did the best I could.” He laughs. “And you just couldn’t get enough of the city—the art, the architecture. And that’s when you told me that you used
to paint but that you stopped when you were thirteen, and when I asked if you’d ever start again, and, you said, ‘Never.’ That it was really your dad’s thing anyway. And you seemed so vulnerable and regretful over it, that I didn’t say another word.” He stops now and blinks his lashes too quickly, and I can tell, because he’s been an emotional Ping-Pong ball since the second I woke up from my coma, that he’s teetering too close to the line again.