She elbowed him. “If he’d said that when we were married, it would have been mean-spirited. Now that we’re divorced, I can hear it as the gentle teasing it is.”
“Oh no,” Walter said, “I meant it as a full-fledged criticism.”
“See what I mean? This just wouldn’t do in a marriage.”
“Why not?” Alice asked. Certainly married couples teased each other. Surely married couples could endure jokes steeped in truth.
“Because marriage loads everything with contrived significance. Oh, he doesn’t like the way I eat, so my options are either to annoy him for the rest of my life or change myself in ways I don’t want to change. In marriage everything is a question of what this will mean for the future. Will we last? The second we got married, as soon as that gold band—” she raised her bare ring finger like she was flipping them off “—was locked around my finger, we started fighting. Incessantly. About everything. Often we lost track of what we were fighting about. Marriage is a death sentence for a relationship.”
“Not all marriages,” Walter pointed out, seeing the concern across Alice’s young face. “Essie has a way of assuming our truth is everyone else’s too.”
“Well, we’re happier than all our married friends, I know that much. We aren’t together because we’re legally obligated to be but because we want to be.”
Madeline smiled in agreement, and Alice remembered that she and Gregory were not married, not in the conventional sense of a signed license, an oath ordained. They were married by their word, something they renewed each day they were together.
“So why do you live separately?” Alice asked.
“There was a time after we divorced when we needed to be apart, to reset,” Walter explained. “We needed the distance. We also couldn’t bear it. So I bought the house across the street from ours so I could watch her.”
“So I could watch you,” Esther corrected.
“Your love began by watching each other,” Madeline said.
“After, when you didn’t need distance anymore, why didn’t you move back in together?” Alice asked.
Walter shrugged. “We like our own space.”
“People talk about being in love, but that’s passive, inactive. Love is a choice. Every day we choose each other. It’s work. It requires effort.” Esther rubbed Walter’s knee.
“It’s the effort that makes it worth having,” Madeline said so quietly only Alice could hear her.
After lunch, Walter and Esther walked the two women to the door.
“Oh, Madeline,” Walter said, reaching out for a hug. “It really is good to see you.”
Madeline wrapped her arms around his torso, a hint of desire grazing her face before she let go.
In the car, as they circled back toward the freeway, Alice counted the glimpses of Esther painted across the city. Her eyes. Her mouth. Her hair. All the ways Walter had immortalized her.
As they drove past a painting of Esther’s ear resting in a field of daisies, Madeline said, “They’re as happy as ever.”
When they returned to the house in the woods, Madeline trotted toward the door like she might hop into the air and click her heels together. Alice trailed her, relieved. While Alice had never met Walter and Esther before, she could not imagine a happier state for them than being divorced. Certainly that was an active choice, yet they made it look effortless, being that connected. They’d written their own terms for love, a love that grew out of Madeline’s story. It was not a failed story. Although there wasn’t an official tally to their wager, Alice mentally put a check mark in her column, one point for continuing scribedom.
19
Sea Glass
Same time next weekremained their parting phrase, now uttered after lunch. Neither had acknowledged the establishment of this new routine. When Alice arrived to Willow Bindery the week after she and Duncan had ventured to the sandwich shop for the first time, the closed sign was already turned on the front door. Alice waited as the last two customers paid for their journals and pens, waving goodbye to Duncan with manicured nails. Duncan nodded indifferently.
“How’s the fan club?” Alice asked as the women disappeared down the block.
“As bewildering as always,” he said, reaching for Alice’s books beneath the register. She opened her tote bag for him to drop them in like Halloween candy. “And where shall we dine today?” he asked. Alice suggested her favorite taco shop.
Since then, they’d journeyed to a wine bar with great paninis, the tourist crab shack at the end of the pier where the food was delicious, exorbitant prices notwithstanding, a brick oven pizzeria, a burger stand, and back to the deli counter. She liked being his guide to Santa Barbara, introducing him to the eateries she’d come to love.
Being around Duncan seemed to bring out a superpower in her, one more confounding than her writing gift. He always had something clever to say about the food and she always had a quip in return. Everything she said was well-timed and funny, like they were playing verbal tennis and she knew how to keep the volley going. She wasn’t this way with most people, but she felt unusually comfortable around Duncan, a feeling that stemmed from their pact to be friends, nothing more, nothing less. Soon she found herself forgetting his perfectly straight front teeth, the way she wanted to tuck the piece of stray hair that didn’t quite reach his ponytail behind his ears, his cloudy eyes with their sad beauty. He was just Duncan. Her binder. Her friend.
When Alice was invited to the wedding of her client Coco, she knew she had to go, and to bring a date, so she decided to ask Duncan. While Alice was about as excited to go to a wedding where everyone would gawk at her, the love scribe, as she was to go to the dentist, she had to attend. It would send the wrong message not to celebrate the love she brought into this world. As bad as it would have seemed to decline the invitation, it was worse to go alone.
