In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(14)

* * *



—

The next weekend are our back-to-back birthdays, June 18 and 19. I find that I can barely remember all the happy birthdays that I know we’ve had, because waves of grief knock them down. The waves of grief—which I had always thought of as representing a certain ebb and flow of feeling—turn out to be much more like actual waves, the big gray-green waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Thick, salty, consuming, and cunning, picking you up and throwing you down somewhere else, and you are not the better for it.

We are celebrating my birthday at a semi-swanky waterside restaurant. I am teary from the time the waiter pours our water. I weep behind the big menu. I go into the ladies’ room and cry some more. I come out and Brian is concerned but not upset or apologetic. I don’t know why I was crying so hard, so unstoppably. A few months ago, he got me a very expensive and very odd present, a hooded marled sweatshirt with tulle trim for five hundred dollars. I still don’t know what it was or why he bought it. I tend to wear black shirts and jeans. Sometimes navy shirts. Occasionally, white. In all of our years together, Brian—sensibly—never bought me anything with a ruffle, a flounce, or anything like tulle. I’m still surprised that I didn’t look at that sweatshirt and think, I see that you have Alzheimer’s. He had been giving me off-kilter cards, sequined hats on frolicking hamsters, for the last two years. His handwriting (architect-neat) was now all swerving block print, and the sentiments seemed rote and flat in one (you are so nice, sweet, funny, and beautiful), and inside the other one, which I still cannot read without curling up, with grief and chagrin, it says: I promise to be kinder to you.

I suggest we go to the city for his sixty-sixth birthday and have a lovely overnight. I feel like an overnight is about what we can handle, and I hope that lovely is still possible. We haven’t yet had our diagnostic neurology appointment, but I can feel something coming hard, a train rumbling through, startled birds flying off. Brian agrees and we go to the city. We relax in the pretty room, admire the courtyard, rest and shower, and Brian asks me if he needs to dress up. I shrug. Other women tell me that their husbands get to be this way as they get older, wanting to stay in their Tshirts and sweatpants, regardless of the occasion. I notice the mismatched straight couples: the woman’s in cocktail dress and heels, and the guy has basically found a clean polo shirt and a belt. I am married to a man who owns two tuxes, four sets of studs, and plenty of cummerbunds, but we have had a lot of conversations about his dressing up or down the last couple of years. I say, as pleasantly as I can, Honey, wear what you want. You’re a handsome man. He puts on his sports jacket with jeans and a white shirt. He puts on the glasses he recently bought (the last few years, his face had begun to look so vulnerable and unsure, I’d begged him to start wearing glasses again. He had missed them, he said, and then he started wearing them every day and we both felt that he was now properly armored). He looks, right then, exactly as he looked on our wedding day: handsome and expansive, at ease with himself and the world.

We have a quiet but lovely dinner at a very expensive Italian restaurant, and we have fun with every dish. Trofie nero and I forget the middle part; then, for dessert, Brian has crema al cioccolato and he makes me order the mille-feuille, which is also chocolate-intensive, and we take our time. We walk most of the way back to the hotel and then my shoes hurt and I say, Let’s get a cab, and Brian says, Just a few more blocks, and I walk one more block and stop. He looks at me and says, Want a cab. I say, Yes, I do. He puts his arm up. We are both, I think, determined to have a nice time.

In the hotel, we begin to make love and Brian says, I’m sorry. Not gonna happen. I say, It’s okay, and it is okay. That is the last time for that.

We kiss and sleep wrapped around each other.



* * *



—

Back at home the next day, we have one of our mutually maddening conversations: I tell Brian that I’m going to weed our picnic area (gravel with tons of weeds busting through). He says, as he has said repeatedly, that although he’d started adding the gravel six weeks ago on his own, he stopped because it aggravated his tennis elbow. I last heard about his tennis elbow five years ago. Also, he doesn’t play tennis. The picnic area is big and bumpy with occasional mounds of gravel, as if giant moles are burrowing through it. Brian says we need a lot more gravel to make the area solid underfoot. He says we should hire someone to bring and spread the gravel. I agree and say that we can’t afford to do that right now. (Also, I don’t want another project to supervise, and since we can’t afford to have it done professionally, however it’s done, it will involve me working side by side with a helper. All I want to spend money on, all I really want to do, is buy shoes and clothes.) I tell him I’m going to weed and smooth out the gravel we do have. He tells me that we need more stone. I tell him that I agree but that we can’t afford it. I tell him that I’ll take care of it. He tells me we need more stone. I’m sure the look on my face is not a pleasant one. He says, Do you want me to do it? I say no, although I mean yes. I mean, Yes, if you could do it the way you would have a couple of years ago, measuring the number of cubic yards needed and discussing the size of the gravel until I want to scream—yes, that would be great. But not now. Now it would not be great and I would either be trying very hard to discreetly micromanage the entire time or else end up doing it myself, so, no. I go to my office to eat a scone and read a mystery and hope that I will clear my head and do some actual work.