Together Apart: Change is Never Easy

by Maxxwell, Lexi

But that was where they’d started, wasn’t it? For years, they had discussed starting a family some day. They were both only 25; they weren’t even remotely too far along to do so — any time over the next decade. But they hadn’t tried, even though they could have. There was always a reason. Sam’s career. Zach’s need to focus on his art, if he ever hoped to break through. High-stress jobs in Portland. The move to Memphis, and new jobs here. There was never time, and family always something they tabled. But Zach and Sam had all of their years ahead of them; they could wait another two or three or five or eight years, settle in, find out what this new life wanted to become, then have kids. So, why had that option felt so wrong?

  Sam had been pondering a creeping truth with a growing horror while waiting for Zach to return. Sam had a sneaking suspicion that having a baby later would be like switching to an alternate road too many miles from the fork. The longer you stayed on one road, the harder it was to switch. And, Sam suspected, she and Zach were on diverging roads. Time would stretch their gulf.

  “Yes. We could try again.”

  “I don’t know, Zach. This past week was great. The best ever. But it was all based on a lie. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “It wasn’t a lie. It was a misunderstanding.”

  Sam sighed. It was a thin line. The thought of a baby had renewed them as a couple. They’d been hot and romantic, playful and close. She had even pulled up her old book on her computer — the one Sam had promised she would publish but never had — and had toyed with the idea of putting it out now to surprise him. But of course, it wasn’t just about him. It was about her. If anything, it was about him inspiring her to create, to put a life out into the world. And in turn, it was about her pleasing him by allowing him to contribute, to offer life by giving something to her.

  But didn’t it seem wrong that it had taken a pregnancy (real or not) to make the past week’s good feeling possible? Shouldn’t they be enough with only each other? Sam should be a woman first, a wife second, and a mother third. Each step in that chain required the preceding step. If Sam wasn’t a fully realized woman, she couldn’t be a fully realized wife. She couldn’t give her best love to a child if she didn’t first have an intense love for her husband. Not if she wanted to stay married.

  The thought sent a shiver down her spine. She loved Zach. Zach loved her. But Sam knew they were both guilty of playing what-if as things had changed between them over the past couple of years. They’d done it less than tentatively, really only supposing, and they’d done it in their heads. The first time Zach said that they would never divorce, she could tell the word had been circling his mind. You didn’t say that word if you hadn’t acclimated yourself to its bleeding edge. You’d use euphemisms and talk around it. Tiptoe. The worst part was how, although his use of the word (again, in a casual, not-really, alternate-reality, less-than-tentative sort of a way) had hurt her to hear, it hadn’t hurt as much as it should have. Because in the same less-than-less-than-less-serious way, Sam had thought it, too.

  She shook her head, again looking out the window.

  Zach leaned forward, moving back to the ottoman. Her anger had faded, leaving behind a weary soul. He seemed to sense it was safe to approach.

  Zach took her hand.

  “Things have been rough.”

  She nodded, looking away.

  “But that’s how it goes. In sickness and in health. For richer or poorer. When someone breaks the remote.”

  Sam snickered and turned, allowing her hand to be grasped as he grasped it. Looking back, that one was funny. She’d been loading the dishwasher while watching TV from across the room, had gotten a phone call, then took it while loading the dishes. Distracted, Sam loaded the remote and ran the machine. They’d hunted for the thing forever, and when Zach found it while looking for a fork, he’d blown his top. There were no buttons on the Roku box they used to stream their internet TV, so it couldn’t be operated without the remote, which was totally ruined. The ensuing argument was large and loud and stupid. Later, neither could believe they’d thought it was even worth fighting about, but they also both knew that in any relationship, fights were seldom about surface occurrences.

  “You had to watch my Friends DVDs,” she said.

  Even that had bothered her, because even with his normal evening’s televised entertainment out of commission, Zach hadn’t gone into his studio. If he lived alone, he’d spend tons of time in there. Zach didn’t like to shut himself away from Sam, even if not doing so meant slowly shutting him away from himself.

  “It was okay. I saw the one where Ross is trying to get his new couch up the stairs and keeps saying, ‘Pivot!’ ”

  She laughed, because she was supposed to. It was one of their dumb, little things — a bit of pop culture that had significance between them, that nobody else would find funny.

  “I’m just saying, there are always rough spots. Wasn’t it that way for your parents?”

  “Well, right up until they got divorced.”

  “Mine, too,” he said. “They always had their ups and downs.” The final down, again, being divorce, she thought.

  “Our parents aren’t the best role models.”

  “No, but they’re not like us. Our fights are all things that will pass. I’m never, ever, legitimately angry at you. Well, okay, I’m angry, but I’m not angry, you know? Like, I’d never go out and badmouth you to anyone even during the worst times.”

  “You did just call me a bitch,” she said. She kept her voice light because it was water under the bridge.

  “I said you were acting like a bitch. Acting is a skill. I can act like Sean Connery.”

  “I was acting like a bitch, though,” Sam said. “I was just upset. But it wasn’t fair to take it out on you.” She squeezed his hand.

  “My point,” he said, “is this exactly. Fights don’t matter. It matters what’s behind them. You know what you actually felt and I … well … ”

  “What?”

  He looked toward the flowers.

  She shook her head.

  “Jesus, Zach. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not about me. But other times, it has been. The time I was such an asshole about going out to dinner? I wanted to fight. I came home knowing it would happen. I didn’t want harmony. I had shit at work, and took it out on you.”

  “So, how do we fix it?”

  “I think we just do,” he said. “Take time like we used to. Stop bringing work home.” He held out a hand. “That’s not a knock on you. I meant mentally. The stress of work. I do it plenty.”

  “And then what?” she said. It felt hollow.

  “I don’t know. Hang out. Talk. Spend time in the bedroom. Not sleeping.”

  “We do that now.”

  “We could take a trip.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t take a trip right now.”

  “Have a baby,” Zach said, jokingly.

  She smirked, but it kind of hurt. It all felt so artificial, and reminded her that the pregnancy cure was artificial, too. They weren’t pregnant, and things were slowly rotting. Pregnancy wasn’t a switch to flip and make things good again. Now they weren’t pregnant, and things felt stilted. In reality, nothing had changed but perception. There had to be a lesson, but Sam didn’t like what it seemed to be.

  “A child would bring us together,” she said, meaning it as a joke.

  Zach nodded, not looking like it was a joke at all. What about that hierarchy? Woman (or man) first, wife (or husband) second, mother (or father) third. If they stayed together — which they would — a baby shouldn’t bring them together because they should be together already.

  Sam stared into Zach’s sincere eyes, trying to remember what it had felt like, all those years ago, to stare into the same place. She had felt such possibility for their future. Such possibility for him. But now? It seemed so much less certain. There was possibility for them. But what about Zach? He’d been so passionate about his art when they first met, back when nothing matte
red and life was a place where you made art and smoked pot and barely scraped by because you didn’t need much to live. You didn’t need a nice place to live, a health plan, an investment portfolio, organic groceries, or a baby. Would he ever be that man again? And what about her? Would she ever be that woman?

  “I love you,” Zach said.

  She gripped his hand tighter, suddenly overwhelmed.

  “I love you, too.”

  He said, “I would never let you go.”

  Sam had never raised the idea that he might.

  And yet, there it was.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One Year Ago

  “I don’t want to move,” Zach said. His hands were covered in chambray-colored acrylic paint, his face speckled with cloud cover (his favorite shade of white). He wasn’t normally the sort of artist who got paint onto things he wasn’t supposed to, until lately. He was actually back to using his studio — a pleasant change — but was doing work that almost felt like the work of a soul-twin. Sometimes it was as if he were sitting to the side and watching himself working, almost afraid.

  Sam walked the rest of the way in, leaving the door open behind her, and sat at his table. There was nothing at the table so Zach didn’t need it while working. That was another change. Usually, Zach worked flat. Recently he’d started positioning his canvases vertically, working from a rather expensive easel that a non-artistic relative had bought him because she “knew he did art and stuff.” Now it was coming in handy, but again, strange. He’d worked flat since he was a kid, yet today it would feel alien. His sculptures were taking on distinct repeating elements as distinctive as Dali’s melting clocks or Dr. Seuss’s forked sticks used to support boomkadizzers and whambamboogies or whatever. It was like Zach had entered a phase without meaning to. He’d always created by mood, and results varied like his life. Now it seemed his moods must have stabilized into a predictable pattern, and he wasn’t sure he liked the elements created by that pattern. There were plenty of happy artists, of course, but it seemed that so many of the best masterpieces were created only after the artists had no other choice — when art was screaming to be vented.

  Sam was beautiful. Zach assessed her like an animal approaching his prey. She’d interrupted him shortly before dinner was supposed to be ready (that promise he’d made to do the cooking hadn’t lasted long; he felt like a bit of a macho asshole for barely trying) and now, with his temperature up, he couldn’t help but appreciate how she crossed her legs, demurely trying (and failing) to hide her sexuality behind a professional mask. Zach didn’t mind the interruption, but now there his fugue state had been popped.

  He realized how much creation he’d been trying to shove into those 45 minutes. Zach had known that was all he had, so he rushed like a man in desperate need of a restroom. His work clothes were in an untidy pile in the bedroom, not even to one side. His shirt was unbuttoned before he reached the front door, and fully off once halfway across the living room. Shirt-off-undershirt-off-slacks-off-jeans-on-T-shirt-on-into-the-studio. He was inside with the door slammed in less than 30 seconds, and now felt as if he were a half-changed beast before her. Sam thought she was coming to see her recently-mild-mannered husband … but in those 45 minutes, he’d become something else entirely.

  Zach hadn’t seen Sam on his mad dash. She must have been in the bathroom. He should have waited and at least kissed her hello, but he felt the ticking clock. Something inside him was clawing out, and he had to purge it. He’d been fighting that something all day. Some had surfaced early, and as a result Zach had illustrated a print ad for a Seattle software company that would never, ever pass client approval. It was possibly the best graphic design work he’d ever done, and Zach was sure he’d be chastised. Frederica at work understood and endorsed marketing, but not true creativity. She would demand to know why in the hell he was wasting her time.

  “You don’t even like your job,” Sam said.

  “I didn’t say I liked my job. I said I didn’t want to move to Memphis.” He heard himself say it and tried to blink back his rushed, insistent tone. He realized he was trying to end the conversation fast so he could return to what he was doing. There would be time for his wife at dinner, when his window was closed, after relieving himself in his studio. When it was all over, he could lie down beside Sam, smoke a metaphorical cigarette, and ask if it was good for her, too. Which, seeing as she’d been in the other room, it probably wouldn’t have been.

  “I just think we should consider it,” Sam said, uncrossing and recrossing her legs atop the stool. “Ted’s paper just entered into a huge distribution partnership. They’re thriving while the rest of the industry crumbles because of the innovative ways they’re using the app I showed you. I’d be stepping in as more than a writer. I’d be closer to a partner.”

  Zach watched her, hardly hearing. Sam’s hair was up, pinned behind her head in a way that was somehow much, much sexier than it had any right to be. Librarians pinned their hair back and came off as cold. Sam did it, and it was like a mere feint at cold — on the same spectrum as wearing a chaste Catholic schoolgirl outfit and looking devilish. The style was full, billowy, and elegant. In the studio’s light, Zach could see the subtle colors that made up Sam’s hair. It wasn’t just brown. It was copper, mahogany, wheat. Even strands of persimmon. Listing them made Zach see Sam as art with breath, like she’d been cut from marble under the hand of a master craftsman. He felt guilty assessing her as she spoke. He was barely listening — too wired, urgent, and pent up.

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  “Well, sure. I guess. I just wanted to seed the idea.”

  Great. Thanks, Sam. Because that’s what he needed right now, while he was trying to create. He needed this problem rattling in his head. But that was Sam’s thinking; she didn’t understand that when he came in here, it was under a sort of spell. There was only room for art and emotion, passion and love, lust and anger, joy and whatever else came out in its raw, most malleable form. This was neither the place nor time for numbers, errands and to-dos.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “But just, while you think … when’s the last time you really delved into your old group? This, here, in your studio? You could do this anywhere. Including Memphis. Your other connections — there’s Skype, text, e-mail, phone, all the stuff that hasn’t been invented yet but you totally know is coming.”

  Zach wanted to scream. He wished Sam would just leave. He had let his connections atrophy, and hadn’t been in a gallery, or talked shop with his old friends and mentors in ages. Zach hadn’t so much as shared a single cup of coffee. For years, he barely made anything, and now, just lately, he’d been creating all sorts of new works, all of which were far, far too personal to sell or show. He knew all of it fine, and knew that as a matter of practicality, it probably wouldn’t matter, art-wise, if they moved. But he didn’t want Sam to remind him, didn’t want to dwell, and sure as shit didn’t want it in his head now, giving him blue balls.

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll think about it.”

  “Yes.” He turned, moving the large, taped-down piece of glass he used to mix his paints. The canvas was turned so it was facing away from Sam. He didn’t want her to see it. It was too close to his core, and because she seemed to be momentarily blind in her ability to read him, like she didn’t know him at all.

  “Thanks.”

  Zach approached the canvas, brush still in his hand. He felt a swell inside; the thing still trying to flee. It had been coming before Sam had come into the studio, and it seemed that despite the interruption, it was still nearing eruption. His hands shook; feet tapped. But when he turned, Zach didn’t see Sam’s delicious, trying-not-to-be-sexy ass leaving the studio. Instead she was sitting in the same spot, her long, tan legs crossed at the knee.

  “Do you need me for something?”

  She shrugged, a small, very Sam-like smile crawling onto the corner of her mouth. “Can I watch you work?”

  Shit. The answer wa
s that no, she couldn’t. Not for the kind of projects he’d been working on lately.

  There was a day when Zach had loved for Sam to watch him work. When they first met, his primary workspace was a shared studio off campus. He always made sure to go when none of the other artists were using it (and, if he could manage, at night) because he preferred the quiet, thoughtful feel of the studio, but he’d also liked it when Sam came, even if all she did was sit across the room, on the shitty maroon futon with its ripped seams, and read. She was like a talisman, her presence a comfort. Zach had always done well with women, but Sam was special. Looking up and seeing her there by him seemed to bolster his spirit when he needed bolstering, to make him brood when he needed to brood, gave him the emotional context he needed to create. But he’d been young, and life had been different. Sam was different, and they’d been different together. Zach grew used to not working, then to working alone. “Personal” used to mean the two of them; projects birthed during their early years felt almost collaborative. Today, “personal” meant personal. Zach didn’t know if he wanted Sam to see this. It would be like letting her watch him masturbate.

  Yet she looked so hopeful. Almost nostalgic. Zach realized that was Sam’s aim when she came into the studio, Memphis as a by-the-way. He had spent so much time not creating, not using his studio, and she’d seemed so delighted lately that he’d been going back to his creative space. Zach probably looked hungry when he entered, and sated when emerging. Something animalistic happened in that studio, Sam must have figured, and she wanted to see it, or be a part of whatever it was. Judging by her recent doe eyes, it was like she was falling in love all over. If only it felt like lollipops and fairies to Zac.

  “I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know that you’d like this style I’m doing now.”

  “I love all your styles. I’m just glad you’re in here, being creative.” Sam said it as if suggesting a kid was coloring to pass the time. But didn’t feel like that to Zach. It wasn’t pleasurable so much as necessary.