Alone

by Michelle Parise

  When I get back to the apartment, I look around at all the boxes and think, Only a few more days. The Musician isn’t there. I sit on the floor with Our Book. On the cover is a drawing The Scientist has done in pencil, a face with a tree for a body.

  When I close my eyes, he is all I see.

  THIRTEEN YEARS LATER

  We’re in a restaurant with our daughter, Birdie, having our weekly “family dinner.” We’ve been separated for eleven months.

  Out of the blue he says, “I was just reading Our Book. All the emails back and forth.” It’s like he’s just put a fist through my chest. There’s no way I’d be able to read it yet; there’s no way I’d expect him to re-read it, not now or ever.

  “Did it make you sad to read it?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says, “but a little happy too.”

  We smile at one another, but I want to jump across the table and shake him. I also want to crawl into his arms and feel his skin against mine. I want to kiss the nape of his neck and also punch him in his stupid face. It’s complicated to love someone who’s betrayed you, okay?

  Afterward, as he walks me and Birdie to my apartment, he puts his arm around me. For the first time in almost a year, we walk like that, his giant parka and mine all bunched together. We stop outside my building. He kisses my forehead and says, “I love you.” He waves at us as we go in.

  This is how we are now. This is who we are. Together, alone.

  HURRICANE

  In the year 2000, after I’ve broken up with The Musician and moved out on my own, I figure my relationship with The Scientist is no big deal. I’m pretty sure that the sex is all we have between us. That we’ll grow tired of each other, eventually, and move on to find people who we actually have something in common with.

  I miss the kind of conversations I had with The Musician — long, intelligent talks about films, novels, philosophy, music. The Scientist never knows what I’m talking about. If I play a song by The Beatles, he can’t tell who’s singing! My vocabulary is too big for him, and I’m constantly dumbing myself down.

  Sometimes I think wistfully of The Musician and the easy symmetry of our life before The Scientist upset the balance. But I’m electrically charged. I’m hooked on this man who burns incandescent. It feels different to love like this. It feels like a hurricane.

  Other than great sex, all we mostly do is fight in these early days. We fight and fight and fight. Once, I throw a bowl of cherries at the wall, and it smashes into pieces, a fireworks display of red and white. Another time I put all his stuff in a bag and throw it off the rooftop of my apartment into the alleyway. He doesn’t seem to care and doesn’t call me for days, which makes me crazy. I imagine him doing horrible things I don’t want to imagine him doing with cute university girls. But apparently he’s just playing video games and waiting for me to cool down. We cannot understand each other, ever. It’s all one giant miscommunication. We fight and fuck and fight and fuck.

  So yeah, there is a lot of passion and drama in that first year together. But there is also a lot of growth. I become a much less judgemental person because of him. I stop writing people off because of things like political affiliation or the fact that they don’t read books. He asks me to teach him about music, so one night we listen to Led Zeppelin, and I teach him to count time signatures out by slapping his thighs with his hands. I also attempt to teach him to distinguish between Beatles (it doesn’t work; he still can’t tell who’s singing). I introduce him to foreign films, and he takes me to blockbuster action movies. We learn to love the things the other person loves. Or at least, we try.

  To get to my three-hundred-square-foot apartment you have to take a fire escape in the alleyway of Honest Ed’s — an old department store famous for its quirky signs and the way you’d get lost in its maze of cheap stuff. Light bulbs hang in strings in the alleyway, and young cooks and dishwashers of neighbouring restaurants are out by open doorways having smokes at all hours of the night. The rats as big as cats in the dumpster, you can hear them fighting as you fall asleep. I paint the entire apartment mustard; I can’t imagine why now, but I do, and The Scientist helps me. We do the bathroom bright purple.

  I am twenty-five and living alone for the first time ever. Sort of. Once I’m in and settled, The Scientist settles in mostly, too. He’s writing his master’s thesis and that’s hard to do while living with roommates. So during the day while I’m at work producing radio shows, he’s at my place writing his thesis on an old laptop at my vintage Formica table. He sleeps at my new place most nights, too, but not always. I hate when he isn’t there because I don’t know where he is. It makes me anxious, panicked, possessive.

  His thesis work is in atomic physics, and some days I get home from work and the entire floor of my little apartment is covered in paper — all with the mad scratchings of a mathematician. It looks like that scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind, just equations everywhere, and then his shiny dark eyes, his tense jaw. It makes me love him just to think of it now.

  Each day is the same. I come home from a full day’s work, he’s sitting at the table, head deep into the workings of the cesium atom. I walk in, say hello, and without a word he comes to me and kisses me, removing my purse with one hand, shutting the door with the other, and we have sex immediately, right there or wherever — it’s only three-hundred square feet. And then we might eat some dinner, or he’ll go right back to writing and I’ll play guitar and sing, but quietly, so I won’t bother him.

  We’re in a mustard-coloured cocoon at the turn of the century, and everything feels full of promise. Every moment feels electric, even the ordinary ones.

  Eventually I begin to edit his thesis for him, for grammar only, obviously. I know absolutely nothing about physics, let alone this very specific thing he has done to an atom, or the giant machine he’s built himself in order to do it. Sometimes it takes me an hour to edit two pages, not because of the physics, but because he has no idea how to write a sentence. He has no idea how to write at all, his brain full of math and machines and experiments, not syntax. About a month into the editing, he comes up to me, there at the table hunched over his thesis, and he says to me with all sincerity, “So are you starting to get some of this?”

  I laugh and tell him no, I am in no way starting to “get” any of it. He asks how I can edit something I don’t understand, so I try to explain that it’s just grammar, it’s just sentence structure, the content is irrelevant. He finds this fascinating. I find him fascinating. We’re in awe of each other, since we’re from totally different planets, since the other person seems capable of powers we can’t possess. We are total opposites. We are madly in love.

  And then for reasons I’ll never understand, because we’ve never talked about it, he asks me to marry him. On September 13, 2001. Yeah, that’s right, two days after 9/11. He phones to say I should meet him at our favourite Italian restaurant for dinner. Like every journalist in the world following the attacks, I’ve just worked about thirty hours straight. I haven’t been home at all. I’m tired. And I want to get out of the newsroom to forget for a little bit the terrible things we’ve all watched, over and over again.

  I don’t know what he’s thinking, at all, especially at a time like this. But here he is, asking me to marry him. He has a ring, even — a big diamond ring, just sparkling at me, and I laugh and laugh and laugh. I can’t stop laughing. I seriously don’t know what the fuck is going on. I don’t even ever want to get married, to anyone! Let alone this complicated, adorable man I have nothing in common with. But I love him. He makes my life an incredibly charged and technicolour thing. Everything about him makes me feel alive.

  I love him so much the thought of not loving him pains me. But I’m also slightly conflicted; do I really want something as important as marriage to begin right when a huge tragedy has just happened? I worry it’s a bad sign, this proposal in the aftermath of terrorism so close to home, while airspace is still closed, while loved ones are still missing, while imag
es of people jumping out of falling buildings are still playing on a loop in my mind.

  I’m looking at this ring, and after a while he says, “So?” and I say, “Why not?” Because really, why not? I say, “I love you and you love me. Let’s take a chance!”

  And we do.

  TEN YEARS LATER

  I’m reading in bed. Downstairs I hear the now familiar sounds: the pop of a beer cap, the hum of the television, the punctuated laughter that seems forced, as if he is trying desperately to find joy in something. Earlier, I stood in the doorway of the TV room, lingering unnoticed.

  “Why don’t you come up to bed with me?”

  He didn’t. He never does anymore.

  We just celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary. By celebrate I mean we had strained conversation over dinner, where he said he was tired about fifty times. I tried to make him laugh, but his face has turned into a hard piece of stone, his eyes expressionless. Our marriage is stuck. It’s just … there. And festering. He’s motionless, unresponsive. I don’t know what’s happened to him, and it’s making me bitter. Angry. I feel trapped and resigned.

  Of course what has happened to him is her. I just don’t know it yet.

  COMPROMISE

  We are engaged for a year, and during that year we learn that planning a wedding is the least romantic thing you can do. We spend that year rolling our eyes at each other in utter exasperation, or giving each other long resigned looks. Despite how independent and kooky we both are, we also want to please everyone and do what we think we “should” do.

  And so we give in to every expectation and trope, and end up planning the most traditional of weddings. 160 guests. Open bar. Seven-course meal. A DJ named Pino. A photographer named Greg. We get no fewer than fifty phone calls a week from either my mother or his mother, each one more maddening than the next: so and so can’t sit beside Aunt whoever, make sure you invite this distant cousin who you’ve never met plus his entire family, what kind of ribbon are you going to get for the centrepieces — eighth of an inch or tenth of an inch?

  I have never cared less about anything in my entire life. Ribbon sizes and flowers and seating arrangements and shoes dyed to match my dress … honestly, I hate it all. He hates it, too, but, like the world’s best almost-husband, he does every little boring task with me. At one point he declares that making the seating arrangement for our reception is the single most difficult puzzle he’s ever done, which is saying a lot for a physicist. He’s there with me to choose the flowers, the reception hall, even the who-on-earth-cares ribbon for the honest-to-God-who-cares centrepieces. We are compromising, both of us, to make this wedding a thing that a wedding is supposed to be.

  But the biggest compromise is this: he wants us to get married in a church. I do not want to get married in a church. I was raised Catholic, but I’m not exactly religious. I go to church for baptisms and confirmations and special days that are important to my father. I’m respectful of people’s faith, but truthfully? I’m not too sure I believe in God. Sometimes I wish I did believe more, but I just don’t. So getting married in a church seems wrong to me — starting our marriage by telling lies in front of all our friends and family, in front of a God that may or may not exist.

  It is very important to The Scientist for some reason. Surprisingly important. He really wants us to get married in a church; he just thinks it’s “right.” He says it will make everyone happy, especially our parents. He asks me to consider the United Church. He thinks it will be less “church-y” for me. And so, for him, I say fine. I say fine to make my almost-husband happy, to make his parents happy. And to spare my own parents the embarrassment of their artsy, feminist daughter getting married in a forest, or on a hilltop, or worse — in a restaurant. So I say, Fine. Fine! I will get married in a church.

  And we do.

  On the Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend in 2002, I wear a vintage 1960s wedding dress and hold a bouquet of bright red and orange flowers. He wears a tux with a tartan vest and stands nervously at the front of the church. I’m wearing the long two-tiered veil my mother and I made together, and everyone we know and love is all in one room, smiling and laughing and getting teary-eyed.

  And there in front of everyone, at the moment that counts most, I forget my vows. I just totally, completely forget. I’m standing there, The Bride On Her Special Day, and for the life of me there are no words. I can’t remember a single thing about the beautiful vows I’ve written. So on the spot I conjure every TV and movie wedding I’ve ever seen, and I make something up: Sickness and health, good times and bad, all the days of our lives, blah blah blah.

  When I finish, he smirks, leans in, and whispers knowingly to me, “Those aren’t your vows, Parise!” I throw my head back and howl with laughter. A fiddler plays as we walk down the aisle, my hand in his.

  After photos, we take our brand new little black car and drive ourselves to the reception at the very north end of the city. The windows are down on this warm October day as we drive up the winding highway to get there. The wind picks up my long veil and takes it out the window, so that it’s flapping along the side of the car, still attached to my head. People in other cars honk and honk at us. They wave and hoot out of their rolled-down windows. We laugh and wave back — this wonderful tradition between strangers.

  He has his hand on mine and he gives it a squeeze. “How about that, Parise?” he shouts. “You just got married!” And I laugh because really, how about that! I’m so happy in this moment, so happy to have done this thing I didn’t want to do and in a place I didn’t want to do it in. Here he is, squeezing my hand with one hand and driving with the other.

  Here he is, my husband, The Husband. My teammate, my partner, my best friend. In good times and in bad, sickness and health, all the days of our lives, blah blah blah.

  This is why, nine years later, when I find out about the affair, I focus unreasonably on our little car. This same car from our happy wedding scene.

  I wonder about the things I can never know for sure. Did he drive it to her place? How many times did she sit in the passenger seat where I once sat with my wedding veil hanging out the window? Did she even notice Birdie’s baby seat in the back? All the little baby toys and books, the smushed-up Cheerios on the seat? And if she did notice those things, didn’t that matter?

  Oh, I know. It’s just a car. It’s just metal. But it was ours, together, and so it’s more than just metal, more than the way we got to our wedding reception or to summer campsites. More than the thing that we used for cross-country road trips or for bringing our newborn baby home from the hospital.

  Yeah, it’s just a car. But it’s all the life that was lived in that car, too. And that strangely hurts almost as much as thinking about his wedding band all over her skin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WAITING

  MARRIED LIFE

  Married life is good. We spend a year in a basement apartment to save money to buy our own place. It’s small and crammed with all of our stuff. Well, all of my stuff. He has nothing. I remember the first time I was ever in his room, in the house he shared with a bunch of guys. I asked, “Where’s all your stuff?” And he shrugged and said he just left it all when he moved to this city. “I like to travel light,” he said, but I didn’t understand. I mean, he wasn’t travelling at all, he was living, wasn’t he?

  I love my stuff. I’m nostalgic for an old bowl that belonged to my friend’s late mother, and my grandmother’s kitchen utensils, and the first piece of art I ever bought on my own. I would never leave any of my things behind. But he could. He did. I wondered what that said about him, what it meant that he was the kind of person that had no sentimental attachment to things, the kind of person that could just up and go whenever he wanted to. Could it mean he was unsentimental about people, too?

  It was a distant early warning sign I chose to ignore. Obviously, because here we are, married and living in a tiny basement apartment with all of these things of mine I would never leave. He
’s brought into our marriage only his clothes, a box of university textbooks, a fishing tackle box filled with odds and ends, and thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of student loans. We also have all the things you get when you have a big wedding like we did. My side, the Italian side, fulfilled all the traditional gift requirements. Twelve place-settings of china, cutlery, and crystal stemware. Coffee makers, blenders, tablecloths, bedsheets, towels, and luggage sets. There are so many trays and platters, I don’t even know what I would ever use them all for. But for now they’re in boxes while we save money to buy a real home.

  We’re in the basement of an old house, so everything slopes. The ceilings are only six feet, three inches high, and The Husband is six foot two. He bends his head down to walk around. It’s freezing cold in there all winter long, and sometimes it gets so bad that we turn the oven on and open the door so I can sit directly in front of it. At night he fills plastic bottles with hot water and puts them in our bed so that by the time I’m ready to sleep it is toasty between the sheets. He’s gold in this way, The Husband. These little things.

  There are all kinds of crazy little insects and spiders in all kinds of nooks and crannies, and when the people who live upstairs walk around it sounds like thunder. We are so happy. We hang out all the time. He watches TV and I read, both of us on the couch with our legs wound together. We play cards and talk and talk and talk. During hockey season, we walk down the street to our local bar to watch the game and eat plates of macaroni and cheese. They know our drinks, so we never have to order. We go to movies, we go dancing, we eat in restaurants all the time because our rent is so cheap and we both hate to cook.