One Italian Summer(6)

“No, like a break,” I said.

I knew in that moment we were both thinking about the Friends episode, the ridiculous, impossible idea that a break was somehow a hovering, and not a speeding car out of town. It almost made me laugh. What would it take to take his hand, turn on the TV, and snuggle down together? To pretend that what was happening wasn’t.

“Are you thinking about a separation?”

I felt cold. I felt it down into my bones. “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know what to call it, Eric.”

He turned stoic. It was a look I’d never seen from him before. “If that’s what you want,” he said.

“I don’t know what I want right now except to not be here. You, of course, are free to make your own choices, too.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means whatever you want it to mean. It means I can’t be responsible for you right now.”

“You’re not responsible for me; you’re married to me.”

I stared at him, and he stared back. I got up and put the dishes in the dishwasher and then went upstairs. Eric came to bed an hour later. I wasn’t asleep but the lights were off, and I was pretending, matching my breathing to the rhythm of a light snore. He crept in, and I felt his body next to mine. He didn’t reach for me; I didn’t expect him to. I felt the weight of the space between us, how vast and tense eight inches could be.

And now the Uber is here.

My phone flashes with a number I don’t know. It’s the driver. I pick up.

“I’ll be right out,” I tell him.

Eric inhales and then exhales.

“I’ll call you from the airport,” I say.

“Here, let me help you.”

The driver doesn’t get out. Eric takes my suitcases out to the car. He puts them into the open trunk.

They are filled with dresses and shoes and hats my mother and I picked out together. Every time I’d pack for a trip, she’d come over, even if was just a weekend away. She knew how to fit ten outfits into a carry-on—“The trick is to roll, Katy”— and how to make a pair of jeans last all week. She was the queen of accessories—a silk belt as a headscarf, a chunky necklace to take a white shirt from day to night.

Once Eric is done, we stand facing each other. It’s an unseasonably cool June day in LA. I’m wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a hooded sweatshirt. I have a voluminous cashmere scarf in my bag, because my mother taught me to always travel with one. “You can curl up against any windowsill,” she’d say.

“So, have a safe trip, then,” he tells me. Eric has never been good at pretending. I am better. The heaviness of our conversation hangs between us. It causes the immediacy of what’s before us—a split, divorce?—to be in direct opposition to the obvious: that we might already be strangers. That we are standing on opposite sides now. I think, briefly: of course people get divorced in wars. When everything has been obliterated, how do you carry on with doing laundry?

I see the pain in Eric’s face, and I know he wants me to reassure him. He wants me to tell him that I love him, that we’ll figure this out. That I’m his. He wants me to say your wife will be right back. Your life will be right back.

But I can’t do that. Because I do not know where she or it went.

“Yeah, thank you.”

He moves to hug me, and reflexively I pinch back. People must have hugged me, these weeks. All of those visitors must have put their arms around me. Buried their faces into my neck. But I cannot remember it. It feels like I haven’t been touched in months.

“Jesus, Katy, are you kidding?” Eric puts his hands on his face. He rubs the skin of his temples. “I fucking loved her, too, you know.”

He puts his head in his hands. He has cried this week. He cried at her memorial service and on the first day of her shiva. He cried both when his mother and sister arrived, paying their condolences to our family, and when they left. He cried when he hugged my father, and my parents’ best friends, Hank and Sarah. I do not know how to feel about his grief. I know it is real, grounded in his own connection to her, and yet it feels indulgent. It feels like he’s letting something out to dance that should be locked away. I wish he’d stop.

His bottom lip quivers, trying to hold it in, but he can’t. It’s bigger than him, this emotion, and it breaks over him now.

I put my hand on his shoulder, but I do not feel the thing inside me I should. I do not feel protective of him, sorry for him. I do not feel compassion, and it does not stir my own grief. I am too afraid. If I let myself see his pain, what will that say about mine? Since she died, I have not cried. I can’t meet it, not with a plane to catch.

“I have to go,” I tell him. “I’m sorry, Eric.”

Eric says I never call him Eric unless I’m upset with him. It was never “Eric, come cuddle me.” It was “Eric, it’s trash day.” Or “Eric, the dishwasher is full.” But I’m not sure that’s true. I had a million nicknames for him. Baby and bunny and hotsauce. But Eric was my favorite term of endearment. I loved naming him. I loved the specificity of his name. Just the one. Eric.

I’m not a romantic, and I do not think I’m a particularly sentimental person—I’m Carol’s daughter, a woman who understood the importance of a neutral palette and temperament. But Eric is. He has piles of receipts, movie tickets, the stubs from concerts. We store them in shoeboxes in the garage. He is a man who cries watching Finding Forrester, and reading the Modern Love column in the New York Times.