The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

  Both before and after we were married, I hated the thought of needing someone to “complete” me. Of course I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to love someone and be loved. But surely I was not lacking on my own, not incomplete. I grew up an only child, so I’d always been on my own, and I liked it.

  As I envisioned it, my husband and I would be separate people. We would be as important individually as we were together, as a couple. We’d be discrete entities with our own histories, energy, and motion, but we’d be bound to each other like stars in a constellation: a union born by the force of imagination and emotion, by the curious work of the human mind.

  The stars in the night sky are a long way from the surface of the earth, so even the nearest seem to move little, if at all. They appear to be fixed against the firmament from day to day and year to year, permitting us to think them into shapes and symbols. But astronomers know that every star is in motion, that each moves along its own trajectory, according to its own properties. The constellations we see are temporary creations, our effort to draw order and meaning from a mostly unknowable universe, to tell ourselves stories, to guide our way home across oceans.

  Marriage is like that too: a method we’ve devised to protect against the disorder of the outside world, to make sense of the wonderful nonsense that is love. My husband and I would be two individuals who loved and supported and believed in each other, and in so doing, we’d choose to link arms for the long haul.

  I don’t know if I believe in marriage, I confided to a friend, but I feel somehow that the things we could do together, and the people we could become, will be better than anything we could do on our own. I still believe in that.

  We never lived together before we got engaged, not even in the same city, not even on the same coast. It wasn’t intentional; it was our chronology. We fell in love and proceeded accordingly. Being together in the literal sense was a foregone conclusion: we’d get there. Brandon happened to propose before we did, because he was excited, because we were in love. The timing was a surprise, but the fact of it wasn’t.

  Of course now I want to break into the scene, wringing my hands: But did you talk about kids? Did you talk about values? Did you talk about money? Did you sit across from each other and share your visions for life together? Did you make sure those visions aligned, wielding your scrutiny like a carpenter’s level? Do you know you could have done that?

  Do you think your story would be different?

  Brandon finished his master’s that spring and was accepted to a doctoral program at the University of Washington. In June, he landed in Seattle for good, and we began searching for a new apartment to rent, someplace that would belong to both of us, a place to start our life together.

  We moved into a duplex with passionflower vines climbing the fence out front and furnished it with Brandon’s thrift store finds. We sussed out each other’s quirks and habits, set rules and aims. Here’s one: we decided to never see each other use the toilet. He’d heard somewhere of a couple that had held this boundary, declaring that it protected the mystery, some sexual sanctity of our genitals. We both thought it was a compelling idea, and we agreed to try it. When, on occasion, one of us accidentally walked in on the other, the intruding person made a Broadway show of fleeing down the hallway, screaming. That was always fun.

  Every night, we cooked and ate together. In September, Brandon started school and, to pay bills, got two teaching gigs on the side. I was still working at the publishing house. I remember when Calvin Trillin’s About Alice came out that fall, a book-length eulogy to Trillin’s late wife. Brandon and I saw ourselves in Calvin and Alice, measured ourselves against their epic proportions.

  Trillin wrote: “There was one condolence letter that made me laugh. Naturally, a lot of them made me cry. Some of those, oddly enough, were from people who had never met Alice . . . but they knew how I felt about her. . . . I got a lot of letters like the one from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, ‘But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?’”2

  We hung on that passage, reciting it to each other. Did he love me like Calvin loves Alice? Did I love him like Calvin loves Alice? We did. We did, we did, we did. We were drunk on it. Our friends teased us for the way we were always touching: foot draped over foot, shoulder against shoulder, or pinkies locked like a pact. I was drawn to his body as though by a magnet. I remember exactly how it felt to slide myself under his arm, fit the front of me to the side of him. We stood that way for years, until at some point, we stopped.

  Of course it wasn’t like that, and of course it was.

  We were both immersed in academia, but neither of us was sold on where it would lead. I was the first to veer off-course, quitting school and working full-time at the publishing house. I wanted to be a writer, and after-hours I wrote a proposal for a book. When I sold it to a publisher in New York, it felt as though the wheels of my adult life had finally found their purchase.

  I wrote the manuscript the year that we got married. We hit the ground like thoroughbreds, pacing each other. That fall, as I was finishing the book, Brandon started toying with the idea of opening a restaurant. We’d made a friend who owned a successful Italian spot in town, and with her mentorship, Brandon began to plan a restaurant of his own: a neighborhood pizza place, Delancey, where he’d make and serve in Seattle the kind of pizza he’d loved in New York.

  When he’d conceived Delancey, I’d been so deep in writing that I didn’t pay much attention. My whole life had built to this moment: I was writing a book, and it was going to be published! I was learning how to write it as I went along, an intensive process that, many days, left me feeling like my insides had been sucked out with a straw.

  I remember conversations about the futility of his doctoral degree, about whether he would go through with it. The degree was important mostly if he wanted to teach, in which case we’d likely have to move to the University of Wherever He Could Get a Job. We wanted to stay in Seattle, but there were few job openings. Having pulled out of a doctoral program myself, I encouraged him to do what felt right. I wanted him to be able to do work he would love, as I now did. Anyway, even if he had the idea to open a restaurant, I never imagined he’d do it. This was a man who had, after all, also considered robbing banks. Surely he was no more serious about this than he had been about that. People dream of opening restaurants all the time. I’ve probably heard a dozen people in a dozen different fields toss out the idea in casual conversation, usually under the influence of a good meal. Most come to their senses. The steps to opening a restaurant are numerous and byzantine, the costs exorbitant, and the failure rate is high. The leap was so large that I assumed he’d never get there.

  Brandon liked to dream big dreams. He and our friend Sam even made a game of this type of unbridled thinking. They called it “Think Tank,” and it involved taking turns calling out scrappy inventions and lavish solutions to often-dubious “problems.” Over a pitcher of beer, they taught me how to play. My proudest invention—in concept, if not in anything near reality—was a potato that would grow out of the ground already cut, fried, and hot, in the style of the Bloomin’ Onion at Outback Steakhouse. Big dreams were a fun game.

  But while I was writing, Brandon taught himself about building codes and wood-fired ovens, restaurant licensing and leases, how to mix concrete and tile a wall. When I finally came to, when my book was at the printer, I saw that the lease was signed and our basement was impassable for all the scavenged pots and table bases, chairs, and professional kitchen equipment. I understood that I had been terribly wrong. He was going to open a restaurant.

  In the linoleum-floored kitchen of our duplex apartment, I sobbed and pleaded. I didn’t want a restaurant. I knew what that life looked like—debt, tight margins, long and irregular hours—and I didn’t want it. The friend with the successful Italian restaurant had recently filed for divorce. Our relationship stood on a foundation of long dinners and meandering conversations
while cooking; now, when I finished my work each day, Brandon would be at the restaurant, beginning his. He would be a chef, working noon to midnight, seven days a week. Opening a restaurant is not a job for newlyweds. I didn’t want any of it.

  Brandon stared at me blank-faced. His mouth curled, a rictus of disbelief.

  The lease is already signed, he cried. I’ve been working on this for months! His voice had gone high and raspy. I did this for us, he said. I thought you would be happy. Now we can both do what we love to do. That’s what I meant this to be. The restaurant will bring together everything we love.

  But I don’t want it, I said, my pitch rising to match his. It can’t be that easy! That’s not what this industry is. I tried to slow down, catch my breath. I just never thought you’d get this far, I said. I thought you’d move on. I thought you’d give up.

  This would humiliate him, though that wasn’t what I wanted. I hadn’t believed in him, and now we both knew it.

  But I knew whose fault it was. I’d made the huge mistake. I’d been eyeballs-deep in my own work, distracted as I encouraged him in his. I hadn’t been clear about what I wanted, or didn’t want, because I didn’t think I had to be; the restaurant was never, not actually, going to open. Now it was.

  A friend of mine used to have a phrase taped to the wall of her office: Accept it as if you’d chosen it. The first time I read it, it seemed sad. I read it like an admission of defeat, the image of the toddler in the grocery store who, having wailed herself dry on the floor of the cereal aisle, stands and follows her mother in silence to the checkout line.

  When we opened Delancey, I saw that I’d missed the point. Accepting it, this thing I had not chosen—this was not defeat but evolution. This was what I’d heard called “resilience.” This was sanity.

  “Resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering,” intones guru Ram Dass. As a kid I’d seen his name among my mother’s books, down at the end of the shelf where she kept The Dance of Anger and Love Is Letting Go of Fear. Now I knew why she had books with titles like that, whose unnatural collisions of nouns had puzzled me. Here was adulthood: my husband and I owned a restaurant. Love might have to look like letting go of fear. I could try.

  Once I’d recovered from the shock and terror that we were, in fact, opening a restaurant, and once Brandon had recovered from his shock and terror at my shock and terror, we began to sort out a plan. With my book now finished, I was between projects, and this lull turned out to be convenient. I could gather up the energy I’d put into arguing against the restaurant and pour it instead into supporting it. I didn’t know what to write next, anyway, and it was a relief to not worry about it. I could worry instead about how to help Brandon succeed.

  When we got married, we’d each written vows. In mine, I promised to work alongside him to make our hopes and dreams real—a generic sentiment on paper, but when I spoke it aloud, I felt a current pass between us. I knew what this promise meant: that even if I couldn’t predict who he would be or what he would dream of, I had bound myself to him.

  It occurs to me now that I wasn’t worried about myself in this equation, about what I might become or want. I was the known quantity, he the variable.

  We began to refer to Delancey as our restaurant. My first book was published four months before it opened, in April 2009. Between book events, I helped him to finish the buildout, plan the menu, and hire a staff.

  When Delancey opened that August, Brandon and I were two of the three cooks, him at the pizza oven and me making salads, starters, and desserts. I was a confident home cook, but in the restaurant, I was anxious and inefficient. I dissolved. A person’s got to be on good terms with adrenaline to make it as a professional cook: you’ve got to like the rush, rise to meet it and ride it through to the end of the night. When confronted with a fresh wave of orders, I’d cry, hurling handfuls of romaine punitively into the bowl. Resentment calcified inside me like a bone. After we closed up each night, we’d have to clean the kitchen, because that’s part of a cook’s job. On our days off, I’d do payroll while Brandon received deliveries. At home, we distracted ourselves with back-to-back episodes of Battlestar Galactica and plastic sleeves of sandwich cookies from Trader Joe’s.

  But I didn’t want to leave the restaurant, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. And because the restaurant was ours now, publicly tied to his name and mine, I didn’t want to let go. Brandon convinced me to hire a cook to replace myself and to trim back my work to only admin, the bare tasks of ownership. I liked these tasks, anyway, and it turned out I had a knack for them. I found a place I could accept in the thing I hadn’t chosen. And Brandon was right: this restaurant was us, the best parts of us. We got to feed people good food, give them a good night, do work we could be proud of. And it was successful enough that he wanted to open more.

  I was in it with him through the heat and chaos of opening. I could pretend this was our restaurant, say it like that, even believe it a lot of the time. But I was no restaurant creature. So now I was back at home most days, at Delancey only part-time. I could try to remember who I was, try to figure out what to do next, try to get back to writing.

  The house was quiet. I began to cook in our kitchen again. I’ve never minded cooking only for myself, never needed to be feeding another person in order to justify doing the work. So while Brandon manned the restaurant, I cooked, walked the dog, and started to write a new book, the story of opening Delancey. I started going to therapy to try to make sense of what we’d just lived, and soon I asked Brandon to join me. It helped us, and it helped me.

  A couple of nights a week, I’d go to the restaurant for dinner. I sat at the counter, facing the pizza oven, taking in the near-miracle of the place: We did it. I was proud of Brandon for opening a business at only twenty-seven and making it into something so good. I was proud of the community it grew and relieved by the money it made. I also knew it wasn’t my place. I had to get back to me again.

  Did I miss him those nights at home? If I missed him, who exactly was I missing? The husband who’d cooked with me every night, sat at the table with me, played Think Tank with me and Sam over a couple of beers? Or the husband I had now, a chef who was rarely home before midnight?

  I’d be flossing my teeth before bed and feel a heavy sensation below my sternum, like something inside me was falling. I was lonely. I wanted to find him in our bed, curl around him like a vine. To miss him felt good and right, because I’d lost something real, our particular way of love. But when he would come home, I was never excited to hear the key turn in the lock. So did I miss him, or not? When he was awake, he stared at the computer or his phone, his head still at the restaurant. He was tired. I fumed, and I also thought, Look—he’s working so hard. Shouldn’t you be grateful?

  I traveled often for work and occasionally for pleasure. It seemed normal to me, healthy even, that a person should do things by herself, married or not. When I was a kid, it wasn’t unusual for my mother to travel without my father and me. She went to conferences or on trips with her sisters. When my mother was gone, I missed her, but I never read her absence as evidence of a lack of love. I knew she was thoughtful, reasonable, and would come back to us.

  “By taking her mind totally off me,” wrote the artist Anne Truitt of her mother, “she gave me my own autonomy. . . . I realized that she would have watched me had she not been sure that I was all right. And, if she were sure, I could be sure.”3

  I was proud of my independence, but I did worry sometimes about how little I looked back. I worried at this absence of feeling, the way a child tongues the space where a lost tooth used to be. But I didn’t want to be the opposite, did I—someone who never does anything without her spouse? Brandon and I knew couples like that, and we agreed that it didn’t suit us. If that kind of dependence would be unhealthy, surely our independence was laudable, a good sign.

  Our fights never lasted long. I remember only one night, maybe two, of sleeping on the sofa. But we were not skil
led at fighting. We rarely emerged from an argument with a better understanding than we’d had when we started. At some point in any fight, we lost the ability to hear each other, a sort of psychological bursting of the eardrums. Our therapist suggested that when this happens, one of us should rush to the fridge, open the crisper drawer, take out a vegetable, and wave it around. She called this “the eggplant trick” and suggested that the stupidity of it would snap us back to reality. We never tried it.

  Every couple fights the same fights over and over, and we too had choruses we’d return to. In an effort to make a life, and to make that life work, we’d assumed particular stances. With him at the restaurant, I did everything at home. When I asked for help, he said I wanted too much. He said I didn’t value how hard he was working. If I pointed out a task he’d forgotten to do, he pronounced me petty: If I was the one who noticed these things, why didn’t I just take care of it? I developed a habit of collecting discontents, sitting on my complaints and hurts like a clutch of bad eggs. He’d dismiss me as “irrational” or “crazy,” which had the logical effect of making me crazy. Once, arguing our way up the steps to our duplex, I pummeled him in the chest with a bundle of mail. Nine weeks pregnant, sitting at our kitchen table as we argued, I lifted a white china bowl of beans over my head and, in the sweaty grip of first-trimester hormones, launched it at the wood floor. It exploded in a confetti of shards and brown goo. I grabbed my keys on the way to the front door and drove loops in the dark while my phone rang, Brandon Brandon Brandon, on the passenger seat.