The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

  Perel: When you pick a partner, you pick a story. And that story becomes the life you live and the parts of you that become expressed. And sometimes you realize after years of living those parts of you that there are other parts of you that have virtually disappeared.

  The summer of jury duty, I felt close to Brandon. When I told him about Nora, I’d made us both afraid, but we were afraid together. We talked about it, unpacked it, worked at it. We had sex more often than we had in years. We carried the fear between us like an open secret.

  That fall, 2015, June turned three. We were managing, like parents of young children do. We had about a dozen hours of paid childcare a week, a regular schedule we’d worked out with a young dancer who bussed tables at Delancey and babysat on the side. I didn’t have enough work to justify spending more on childcare. I was once again between writing projects, between ideas. Meanwhile Brandon got a new opportunity: a third restaurant on a busy corner, a lucrative idea he wanted to call Dino’s. I got angry. He knew I didn’t want another business, but he tried to convince me anyway. I let him convince me. I didn’t stop him. The location was too good to pass up, he said. And in some ways, Dino’s would make Delancey and Essex easier to run, because economies of scale! This was all good reasoning. But another restaurant was also another siphon on our hours, days, months, attention. I didn’t want it. I wished we weren’t having the conversation. I wished what we had was enough.

  Building restaurants is a twenty-four-hour work cycle. I was used to periods like this, but now we also had June. I didn’t want to help open Dino’s. I would make a different contribution to the family business: I would pick up the slack at home, doing more parenting while Brandon worked extra. That I could do. I would protect myself and June from the chaos of opening a business. But soon I felt stuck: How would I ever be more than the primary parent for our child? He said I was being dramatic, and I knew I was. The restaurant would open, and then we’d find a new rhythm, a new normal.

  But a question: If this is what lots of marriages look like after children—if this is “normal,” as we’re told it is—does that mean it’s okay?

  No, this question instead: Is it okay with me?

  It was okay until it wasn’t. I was angry, and I was often on my own with a three-year-old. When I wasn’t with June, I was with the contents of my skull. I thought of Nora. I thought of the lesbian mothers at June’s school, and every other lesbian-looking woman I saw. The fear that I’d planted that summer in our marriage, I watered it. I was what we were afraid of. I was the one who’d brought this into our house, the credible fear of our undoing. I should be the one to rout it out.

  That fall and early winter, I devoted myself to the task. I tried to go back to who I’d been before jury duty, to unsee whatever I’d seen in Nora, unfeel what I’d felt. As the months went by, I did manage to stop thinking about her. Thinking about her made me feel crazy, because it had no basis in anything. It was crazy. So I willed myself to stop, and after a while, it worked. I broke the habit.

  But the ground did not resolidify. It was porous now, and fertile. I watched my desire spread like seeds on a stiff wind, stick to women in coffee shops and on the street and outside school. The seeds bloomed, proliferated like invasives.

  June was in school each morning from eight forty-five to eleven forty-five. Sometimes after pickup we’d go visit Brandon at Dino’s, and the three of us would have lunch. The place was progressing nicely. It no longer looked like the check-cashing business it had been, with bulletproof glass and a burgundy laminate counter that curled like a question mark. Now the counter was gone and the drop ceiling too, along with the stink of cigarettes that had infused both. In their place was the sweet-sour perfume of sawdust and an airy, tall-ceilinged room trimmed with painter’s tape. There was reason to be proud.

  I have a picture of June at Dino’s from around that time, before the bar and the booths were built. A square of white light falls from the high windows, and June sits on the floor where it lands, perched on the edge of a two-by-four, with the doll she calls Big Baby. She’s wearing a pair of grape-purple Puma high-tops with Velcro straps, and she’s looking somewhere above the camera, eyebrows a little up, mouth pursed, like she’s about to say something. She looks like a doll herself. The photo was taken by a friend who’d been visiting town with her husband. A few weeks later, my friend called with unexpected news: she and her husband had separated. When I look at the photo now, in one of the albums I keep for June, it too seems like a picture of a marriage that’s ending.

  9

  We went to see family for Christmas, and when we got home, rather than thrill as I usually did at being back in our own bed, I felt like I had disappeared en route. Everything and everyone seemed far away. It had been seven months since jury duty, and I had never lost count. I felt worse, not better. To hide from the shame—or was it to escape everything else? To give in to the fantasies?—I tunneled under, sunk even further into my head. I told no one what I was thinking.

  A friend was having a big birthday at the end of January, and he invited a bunch of us to a rental cabin in the snow. Brandon took the weekend off, and to celebrate the occasion, we bought new winter gloves, hats, and snow pants. For June, I brought along a brand-new copy of Candy Land, my favorite board game as a child. I had grand visions of us playing it, visions that evaporated as soon as I set it up, when I remembered it’s an instant nap for anyone over age ten and June was enraged that it had rules.

  Instead, we rented cross-country skis. The first afternoon, even June made it a few yards. Then a friend took her back to the cabin, and the two of us got to ski on our own for a while, on a path through the woods. I hadn’t been on skis since I was a kid, and I’d forgotten how quiet it was, the smooth and efficient swish of polyethylene through groomed tracks. We’d needed this, to move together through the cold winter air. Our noses ran, and we licked our lips and wiped them on our sleeves.

  In the cabin, the heat vent was too close to the bed. I couldn’t sleep, so I watched my husband and our child, these people I called mine, sweat sticking their twin hair to their twin faces. I put on my headlamp and boots and shuffled to the outhouse. Orion glittered above the tree line.

  On the drive home, I rode in the back with June. Snow was falling through the bluish dusk. June asked me for a story about Olaf, a friendly giant I’d made up who often got into scrapes requiring the help of his human friend June. As I spoke, she nodded off, and I caught Brandon’s eye in the rearview mirror. I told him about a thing I’d recently heard her say, that she’d pointed at her own belly and said there was a baby there. She wanted to call the baby Juicebox. We laughed, wheezing, not wanting to wake her.

  How could this kind of contentment coexist with the mess in my head? How could this love coexist with the desire for a whole other love? Shouldn’t they cancel each other out? I had watched my husband and child sleep, choked with feeling. I wanted to press a woman against a wall with the length of my body, a woman who looks like a boy, and fuck her. Does one life preclude another?

  I wanted both, two lives in this body, running alongside each other in parallel, like ski tracks.

  I get email newsletters from the Gottman Institute, famous for its research on relationships and marriage. The subject line of one reads, Move from me to we.

  “It’s important to move from me to we in your marriage,” the email says. “What do we need? What do we want? What do we like? . . . You get the feeling they are ‘in this together.’”

  This struck me as a noble way to operate. Very country-above-self, one-nation-under-marriage. I wanted to stand under that flag. But I had mixed feelings when I heard or saw it in practice, the sort-of royal we. Oh god, have you seen that new Wes Anderson movie? We hated it!

  Was there a time when I thought of Brandon and me that way, as a unit that moved and thought together? If I had, it was with effort, not instinct. This felt like a personal failing. Brandon and I talked about it, attributed it to my being an o
nly child, screwed from the get-go. The bridge between the poles of we and me felt perilous, like a slackline over a pit of snakes. I knew I shouldn’t linger; for my own safety, I should choose one or the other.

  Now that we were people who skied, we decided to do it again. This time we’d leave June with my mother, and that would be nice, a day-date. It was February, and Brandon was working every day, doubles on the weekends. But on President’s Day there’d be no construction work at Dino’s, so Brandon could take the day off. We’d drive an hour east, over Snoqualmie Pass, and ski for the day.

  I knew this had to be it: I should tell him what I was feeling. In the passenger seat, I practiced opening my mouth, forming syllables like smoke rings.

  There’s something I want to talk about, I said. I’ve been feeling really down. Maybe you could tell.

  You’ve seemed off, even when we were at the cabin, Brandon said. He glanced over at me.

  You remember how I felt last summer, after jury duty? I can’t seem to make it go away.

  You mean how you felt about that lawyer? he asked.

  Not just her. I sort of talked myself out of thinking about her. It made me feel nuts. But now I keep noticing other women.

  The lesbian moms at June’s school?

  Yeah, I said. I can’t stop thinking about it. Remember when you asked me last summer if I had to do something about this?

  You mean hook up with a woman? Brandon asked.

  Yeah. But I don’t want to be with a woman like me—not, like, a straight married woman who’s just “curious.”

  What do you mean?

  I want to know what it’s like to be with a woman who loves women. It just—it doesn’t interest me otherwise. I paused, trying to decide if I should say it, and then I did: I want to know what it’s like to be with a lesbian.

  I don’t know how I feel about that, he said. That seems really different.

  I stared at the dashboard.

  What if you fall in love? he said. Isn’t that what you’re saying you want?

  Am I? Surely I don’t want actual love?

  I don’t want to fall in love, I said. I don’t plan to fall in love. That’s not what I want.

  Because I really don’t think it’s okay to fall in love with someone else, he said.

  That’s not what I’m talking about. I just said that.

  But what if it happens? he asked.

  I mean, I hope it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to. I paused, considering. Then I said, But I think, you know, being with someone else—maybe even falling in love with someone else—doesn’t have to change my love for you.

  I don’t think it’s right to fall in love with someone else, he said.

  I didn’t reply.

  So we would open up our marriage, he said.

  Yeah, I think so.

  I really don’t think it’s okay to fall in love, he said.

  You don’t have to, I said. We get to decide what this looks like. We get to choose. We could buy some books about open relationships and read them together. I’ve been looking up stuff online.

  I don’t know, he said. I don’t know.

  You can date other people too, I said.

  I mean, I know how dumb monogamy is, he said. But I never expected you to be the one to want an open marriage.

  I know. Me neither.

  I think I would feel okay if you only dated women, he said. No other men.

  I don’t want to date other men.

  We watched the road for a few minutes, not saying anything.

  I don’t want you to fall in love with someone else, he said.

  Let’s buy some books about this, I repeated. We can learn about it and talk. Set some rules.

  But is this something that’s true, that’s real? he asked. Like, you actually just want to explore this? Or is this an excuse to leave me?

  The road was climbing now; we were nearly at the pass.

  I’m open to trying this if it’s really what you say it is, he said. But not if it’s an excuse to ease yourself out the door.

  I mean what I say, I said. I’m not going anywhere.

  10

  During our engagement, before we were married, Brandon and I both had dreams about being hit on by others. I remember feeling horrified by my suitor’s advances, thrusting out my hand and yelling, “STOP! I’M MARRIED!” In the morning we’d laugh about it.

  I did not want to cheat, not then and not now. Whatever this was, it would not be that. What I wanted was a work-around, a pass. I wanted a pass to be with a woman. Brandon too would have a pass.

  This would not be a threesome, not a fun kink to “spice things up.” This would be separate from us—cordoned off, but permitted. I didn’t want to hide it from him. Isn’t that what cheating is: Something you hide, because you’re breaking the rules? Then let’s rewrite the rules.

  I ordered books on nonmonogamy. The most famous book in the category is The Ethical Slut, but I didn’t buy that one. My reasoning: the title felt too glib. I didn’t feel like a slut, not in a good way or a bad way. The word didn’t fit, no matter how thoroughly it might have been reclaimed, liberated, reframed on its own terms. Love in Abundance had a similar linguistic problem: the title had the word love in it, and we were hoping to avoid that. I also passed on When Someone You Love Is Polyamorous, because when I Googled the phrase “when someone you love is,” the first suggestion that popped up to complete it was “making bad choices.”

  The first book I bought was Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. This struck my ears as hopeful and appropriately sober. I also got More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory, though it sounded possibly too sober, like a grad school seminar. That would be good, though—a degree and diploma, a seal of approval, something sturdy to assure me that we could do this.

  Opening our marriage, the books said, would require a tremendous amount of talking. We would have to commit to clear and often radically open communication. The fabric of any relationship needs tending and, over time, mending, and if we made our relationship nonmonogamous, it would require more attention, not less. The weave of our fabric would become more complex, requiring adroit management to avoid knots and fraying.

  Say it all, I remember thinking. Keep talking to each other. Just keep talking. And—this one loomed large—do not say anything you don’t mean. How often, in everyday conversation, had I said things I didn’t mean or feel, just to be polite, to make things easier? How often had I said to Brandon what I thought I should say in order to maintain order, to repair a rift? We had never been good at disagreement. One of us always gave in when it got too uncomfortable. One of us would recognize that we were at a dead end, would begin to back out. We rarely paved a road through to the other side. We rarely stuck with it long enough to forge any kind of new, if painful, understanding.

  If I wanted an open marriage, and if I wanted it to work, I had to get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations. Wanting this made me feel bold. I would rise to the occasion.

  We spent two months talking about opening our marriage before we did anything about it. We went back to couples’ counseling, this time with a new therapist experienced in working with nonmonogamous couples. It would be a process, and we wanted to get it right. There were moments when we felt together in it. There were moments when we screamed at each other. There are moments I am glad for. The more we talked, the more we learned, the closer we felt. It seemed inevitable, and right, that we should be taking this step. Nonmonogamy would be troublesome and difficult, but monogamy is troublesome and difficult too. To look at them side by side, to interrogate them both as valid ways of living—we’d never done this, never thought to.

  I don’t know if monogamy makes sense to me anymore, Brandon announced one day.

  I nodded in agreement, swallowed hard, forced back a grin. I had brought us to this point, and I’d been terrified that he would regret it. To hear that he didn’t—that he was even gaining from this tendenti
ous contemplation—had to be a sign. We’d be okay.

  What we were talking about was us. For the first time since our wedding, we put language to our commitment. We cheered: we got to decide what we were and what we weren’t! This was our marriage, and we could write the rules however we wanted. We felt like pioneers on the frontier of our lives. The freedom we were after, we would build it ourselves! I alternated between euphoria and a searing anxiety, adrenaline pumping through me like I was being chased. This confused me, because I was also the one giving chase.

  Here’s what we decided: we’d remain each other’s primary partner. In the language of open relationships, this meant that we’d give each other priority, the bulk of our time and energy. It meant that we were committed to a shared future with shared goals and a shared home. We also had a child together, and she would come above anything and anyone else. We agreed that June should not be impacted, especially not negatively, by the opening of our marriage. It had nothing to do with her.

  Anyone else we dated would be a secondary partner. We would be open with each other about who we were seeing, and we would communicate with trust and clarity when it came to scheduling. We would have to be generous with each other, each making time for the other—and for the other to be with others. I wanted to date a woman, a queer or lesbian woman. I did not want Brandon to vet my partners, nor did I want to vet his. Brandon didn’t feel strongly either way, or didn’t say he did. Anyway, I had a husband and a child: What queer woman, what lesbian, would want to date me? And what straight woman would want to get with a married man? We commiserated, encouraged each other. We were both afraid of failing, and of succeeding.

  The sticking point remained love. We couldn’t seem to get around it.