I find Brian staring down at me with a smug grin. “Well,” he says.
I laugh.
We have what I assume is an ordinary married sex life—a couple of times a week, motions we have mastered for an economy of time, a guarantee of pleasure, and a solid night’s sleep. Whoever comes first makes sure that the other gets there, too. It is always good, and it is occasionally great. Like just now. Whensexisn’t the right word, anymore. It’s more like spilling over the boundaries of your own body to fill someone else’s, and having them do the same to you.
In many ways, this is a microcosm of marriage. There is a lot ofDid you use up all the creamer?andAre you going by the post office today?but every now and then, there are moments of transcendence: when you rise in tandem the moment your daughter crosses the stage at fifth-grade graduation; when you glance across the table at a dinner party and have an entire conversation in silence; when you catch yourself looking around at your home and your family and think:This. We did all this.
Brian had fallen for me fast. He once told me that when he was with me, he didn’t fade into the background. Food tasted better. The air was crisper. He said I hadn’t just changed his world. I’d changedtheworld.
Brian reaches for a dish towel and hands it to me, the messy business of love that no one ever has to deal with in Hollywood.What do they do?he has whispered to me at movies.Sleep in the wet spot?He kisses me lightly and pats the marble counter. “Promise me you’ll scrub this before you cook on it,” he says, and starts to withdraw.
I hook my ankles together and trap him, looking into his eyes. It’s something you don’t do a lot, when you’ve been with the same person as long as I have. You glance, you skim, you catch his gaze, but you don’t really drink in his features as if they are an oasis in the desert. But now, I stare and stare until Brian fidgets, and gives me a sheepish smile. “What?” he asks. “Is there something on my face?”
“No,” I say. But I see it, finally—the wonder. The belief that he might wake up and all of this will be a dream.Oh,thereyou are,I think. The man I fell in love with.
—
IMETBRIANat the communal kitchen in the hospice where my mother was dying. We crossed paths at the coffee machine. I knew, after a few days, that he liked flavored coffee—hazelnut or French vanilla—and that he was a lefty. There was always a residue of graphite on the comma of his hand, as if he’d spent the day writing in pencil.
I brought a lunch snack most of the days I was sitting with my mother, and sometimes I would eat it at the scarred little table in that communal kitchen. Brian was there, too, making mathematical notations that were so tiny I had to squint to see the numbers. They were figures I didn’t understand; factorials and exponents and equations way beyond my AP Calculus memories.
“Good day or bad day?” I asked him. This was the hospice equivalent ofHow are you doing?which, in hospice, was always:dying.
“Bad day,” Brian said. “My grandmother has Alzheimer’s.”
I nodded. I was grateful, at that point, for my mother’s lucidity.
“She thinks I’m a Nazi, so I figured it would be better if I left the room.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “It kind of sucks, you know. To have your body survive the Holocaust and your brain be the part of you that quits.”
“You’re a really good grandson, to be here all this time.”
He shrugged. “She raised me. My parents died in a car crash when I was eight.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” Brian watched me open a bag of Goldfish. “Is that all you’re eating?”
“I didn’t have time to go food shopping—”
He pushed half of his turkey sandwich toward me. “It’s your mom, right?”
It wouldn’t be hard to figure that out, and it still hurt, knowing that someone else had asked questions, had made judgments, had pitied me. “It’s not rocket science.”
“No. Quantum mechanics.”
I glanced up, confused, and found him hunched over his papers again, scribbling.
“You don’t look like a physicist.” I glanced at the sea glass of his eyes, and the hair that kept falling into his face because it was too long.
“How am I supposed to look?”
I felt my face heat up. “I don’t know. A little more…”
“Greasy? Frayed?” He raised an eyebrow. “How about you? What do you do, when someone isn’t dying?”
The way he said it, so frankly and honestly, was the first thing I liked about Brian. No euphemisms, no subtlety. At the time, I found that directness refreshing. But I also couldn’t say the words out loud—that I was an Egyptologist who’d been ripped out of Egypt and who couldn’t see a path back to completing my Ph.D. That, unlike with numerical equations on paper, there wasn’t an easy way to solve my problem.
“I’ve never understood quantum mechanics,” I said, steering the conversation away from me. “Teach me something.”
