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You adjusted the pillow under you.
Friends, I said, but deeper.
You’re proposing that we be just friends?
Companions.
Like the French?
Listen, I’m not proposing anything. It’s just a thought. A thought that was in my head alongside other thoughts.
Alongside, listen to you. Did Cliff teach you that word?
I ignored that. The whiff of a headache returned. I said, It’s just a thought.
A thought. So let me understand this. You called me here to dump me with a line from your boyfriend’s high school playbook.
I don’t have a boyfriend.
Your boy, then.
I’m just saying that it’s been how we’ve been living—
Friends without benefits.
Companions. And it hasn’t been the worst thing in the world.
For you.
Let’s drop it, I said. I’m sorry, okay? I, Beckett Robinson, am sorry.
But the magic had worn off the word.
You sat looking at your plate, then pushed yourself back from the table. I’m going to grab a few things and get going.
Get going was not in the script for the evening. The thirty-minute promise was just to get you in the house and once you were here, you’d see what an easy-breezy time we were having, then go upstairs and go through your nightly beauty regimen. Once, one of your clients jokingly called you a female Schwarzenegger, but mispronounced, and you were so offended that you swore you would never train her again, but less than a week later you were stabilizing her shoulder with kinesiology tape. Why should our situation be any different? You didn’t hold grudges long. I ate the rest of my meal, waited, then I thought about clearing the plates, but you had eaten only half your food. You never ate only one plate. I wanted you to finish it, at least, if you were going to leave. It was not cat food. I missed PointFive laying his warm, shaggy belly on my feet while I ate.
I called for you from the bottom of the stairs. When you didn’t answer, I went up and found you stuffing flared Dolfin shorts into a backpack. Would they still fit? I didn’t even have a chance to ask you about your measurements before this business with Gluten came up.
Your food’s cold, I said.
You shook your head. You didn’t stop packing. You were taking clothes from the dresser in the walk-in closet.
Do you find me attractive, Beckett? Just yes or no. I can take it.
Yes, of course. Even before the surgery and stuff.
You know, there were so many men I could have been with right now but count on Princess to pick a dud.
I didn’t say anything. A dud. While digging holes for Viv, I had the same thought: You deserved more. You could have been anybody’s wife, made any man devoted eternally, happy to keep referring to his wife, flashing his phone lockscreen so others could see you. You were fit, social, practical, easygoing, at least you used to be, and chose me. Me, with my firm, bland tofu love.
So many men, you said. And I really do find them all attractive. In their own way. Even the pot-bellied men, even the fat, old biker guys with bandanas and white goatees, the hairy guys at the gym. They can’t even see how their beard hair is connecting to their back hair. There are parts of you that only I can see.
You called me a dud.
I like men, you went on. Men like me. That’s how this works. Yeah, some of them just want to bag a Black chick, but—
And an expectant look on your face appeared, the look that I recognized but never knew how to fill with the right words in the moment. I needed to match the moment, your feelings, somehow.
Well, I like you, I said. Everything about you.
Liking me, you said, is not the same as liking women. You turned away from me.
I stepped close and tried to kiss the soft hairs on the back of your neck. Your shoulders were raised, tense. I traced the new curve of your body then put my hands around your waist and stayed behind you until your shoulders relaxed. There was definitely more of you.
We were still in the walk-in closet, that place where you had tried to get me off earlier that year. I turned you around and lifted your halter top. Your breasts were still flawless, like you yourself had been consulted on the surgery, perfect drops of water, breasts made for an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini.
You looked down at yourself, directing my attention lower, then up at my face, nervously.
I explored with my hands, looking into your eyes.
Does it still hurt? I asked.
You shook your head. By your standards, that meant, yes, it did, a bit.
The doctor did a good job, I said.
You don’t think the left cheek feels bigger than the right?
Everything’s up to code, I said.
Beckett.
I kissed your mouth, I brushed the wings of my lips against your nose, your cheeks, your breasts, against every modified part.
You don’t have to, you said. I was squatting with one leg and kneeling with the other, debating, but you laced your fingers around the back of my head and pulled me between your legs. Listen, we’ve done a lot of things, but we’ve never had sex where one of us enters the other. When my lips found yours, you reached out with one arm as if checking the world for solidity, as if not wanting to explode into spores. I could feel heat radiating from his head and neck.
I stood up and tried to enter you, but you said, We need therapy.
Naturally, my erection flagged.
Beckett, I’m serious, you said. You pushed me away. If you want this to work, we have to go to therapy.
No therapy.
Yes, therapy.
Let’s try my thing first.
Sex?
You said it so mockingly that I had to find another plan. I said, Let’s go away for a few days. Change of scenery.
I don’t want a distraction. I want to address this.
How?
We will. I held your swollen face in my hands. Would it ever return to the face I first saw at the gym? I added, That’s part of the trip.
If your thing doesn’t work
It will.
then we go to therapy.
It will, I said. I didn’t want to lose the moment.
I’m going to hold you to your word, you said. You mess with my trust again and you’ll regret it.
I’ll come, I said.
I could smell citrus in your teased hair.
I considered you for a minute, how your hair used to be, how your breasts now were, how your arms used to reach for me, how your hips now groaned. Regardless, I wanted to preserve every version of you. I understood then why people froze themselves on sex tapes.
There wasn’t anything wrong with our marriage. We’d go to S&M’s wedding in August. We’d renew our vows at our own ceremony on a beach. You’d be proportional. No, stunning. A cream dress against your skin. Silver light on your shoulder. Your friends would show off their toned legs. My friends, some guys, would roll up their trousers. We’d play some volleyball and light a fire on the beach.
After all that hot and heavy, you didn’t stay the night.
I couldn’t sleep. I went to the closet and looked at your clothes, picked up your shoes. One of your boots was coming apart at the sole so I took it down to the basement and repaired the sole with some construction adhesive. For some reason, I slept better after doing that.
* * *
CHAPTER
One Thursday evening, a month after Princess got back, we took a vow of silence. There were eight people at the retreat. Island people, Oregon people, Vermont people. Older women who could do headstands. Men who wore shorts year-round as evidence of their hardiness. The retreat ran from Thursday evening to Sunday. There were rules. No talking, of course. No devices, no reading, no writing. No exercise, no dieting. No eye contact with others, no smiling or nonverbal greetings, no acknowledgement of another’s presence, but no disavowal either. No falling asleep during meditation. No fragrances. No substances, no meat. A vow of celibacy was part of the package too.
I may have overpromised when it came to a trip. We couldn’t just fly off to Maui. I had to figure out where to go that would be far enough away to fix our marriage and close enough to escape from if a showdown like the one in the gym parking lot arose. Instead of a resort, a retreat would do, but nothing too marriagey or couplesy. I didn’t want to set our problems beside other people’s problems and compare them. I actually didn’t want to talk about the situation at all, so I started by searching for yoga retreats, but nothing too strenuous since you were still healing. Eventually my search migrated away from yoga and I arrived at this: a silent retreat on Bowen Island. It would be like therapy without the talk. It had all that healing, restorative, meditative crap that you—and Gluten, oh, he’d like this—believe in. I’d smiled at the screen. You’d be on Bowen with me, getting used to my presence again, forced to practise kindness, to let go of anger and forgive me. It was probably written into the reservation form—no malice, no resentment. Birds cooing, water falling, namaste, baby!
You biked ninety minutes to the ferry at Horseshoe Bay. I would have biked with you if you had told me. You were allowed moderate exercise at this point, but ninety minutes, Princess? It was less vigorous than running, you said, as if running forty kilometres was your first choice of transportation.
On Friday morning, chimes sounded at 4:30 a.m. to wake us. Meditation time. Wearing a blanket like a coat, you dragged yourself to the meditation lodge. I sat myself in your field of vision, not centred but still hard to ignore. You did not sit, although you were allowed to. You planked, then when an authority figure came by, you knelt on all fours, then finally you squatted in, I knew this, malasana pose.
A few minutes into the first session, I was through thinking about my breath and wondering instead what they were going to feed us and speculating on the various traumas that brought the different people to the retreat. I pushed away thoughts of Gluten as best as I could, but there was nothing else to occupy my mind. My hips were tight. I questioned whether his objection to being bedded was less an issue of marriage and more of nineties sex ed, a curriculum conceived from the terror of disease. Maybe he was celibate. Hard to believe, but he never brought up a past relationship, except for a vague reference to cheese and a French girl. And the ambiguous trip to Toronto. It pained me to imagine the opposite, that he was flitting around, laughing and horseplaying with other people while I was holding different screws up to the light. Was he dating one of those women from the running group? Was he cockteasing all his friends? What old Palm Springs Sugar Zaddy would swoop in and buy his love by faking attention? I felt like I was the only one who understood this vulnerability in his character, he himself blind to it, the only one who would not take advantage of it. I longed to cover his life with a blue tarp and surround it with pylons. But you. My hot cheerleader, Princess, made me the most popular boy in school. I would like to go back a few months and have you as you were, dressing yourself at the side of the bed, elbowing your T-shirt over your head. The things I loved from the beginning took on a nostalgic tint. How your breath stopped before you sneezed. The passport photo you kept of your father. Your flourish at tapping your debit card.
I tried to stay awake. I succeeded for most of the hour.
At the second meditation session I drifted in and out of sleep or enlightenment. I had a conversation with you in my head. Dear golden Princess, I said. There are things I can’t say even to myself. I was just helping him work out some things. He was on a camel crossing a desert. He dismounted and removed a bright piece of glass from his robe. He looked around. He had come into possession of a large crystal that he was not supposed to have and this would make him a criminal if it was ever discovered so he buried it in the desert and every year it returned to him and he’d have to cross the deserts of Saudi Arabia again to bury it deeper and deeper so not a glint of it would reveal itself on the surface. Who was I talking about? He was a two-dimensional figure against the black screenworld of a videogame, cutting through a swamp to get to the end of the level where he’d need to defeat a beast, only the beast got bigger and more terrifying each year and he wouldn’t know how unbeatable the monster was this time until he got to the end of the level. And suddenly there was another presence who said, I’m at the end of the level, Beckett. I can be your Player 2 if you want my help to beat it too.
I smiled softly at you and sent you a giant golden egg of goodwill and light. I was healing you of the oddity of being born in Yamoussoukro, a place you wish you could be from, to a mongrel white man and a half-Moroccan woman. You couldn’t make eye contact with me, but I felt you receive it. The egg travelled up your spine to your head, it reached through time to the girl you were in Côte d’Ivoire and Spain and France and England and America and radiated through you until the whole room was awash in golden light.
While the room was glowing, I meditated my way into another tiny invisible nap and awoke feeling refreshed and cheerful.
* * *
Friday night, in our room, you were looking at the blocked pores on your nose. Mirrors shouldn’t be allowed here. You did not want to squeeze although your rhinoplasty was years ago. Retreat rules said I was not allowed to notice what you were doing or provide reassurances.
I removed your hands from your face and shook my head.
I might have appeared like a disapproving parent.
A few moments later, you were pinching the skin of your nose.
I lowered your hands.
You spoke: You realize I shouldn’t be sitting for long periods, right? And that one of the foundational ideas behind meditation is sitting.
Mouthguard still in place, I mouthed, Sorry. But I wanted to point out that you chose to ride ninety minutes here—not the actions of a woman worried about sitting.
We returned to silence for a few minutes, before you spoke again: You booked this trip and didn’t ask who was covering my classes. You didn’t ask about the bachelorette party.
I held a finger to my lips.
You lowered your voice to a whisper, I came back from Costa Rica and you didn’t ask me anything about my trip, Beckett. Nothing.
I did.
You didn’t. Not even in the car. You asked if I was hungry and then when we were eating dinner you checked your phone half the time. I mean, now I know why.
I couldn’t stay silent or point to the rules without further upsetting you. I said, Normally you tell me things without my having to ask.
I had major surgery and my husband asks rice or pasta like a flight attendant.
A silence followed and I wasn’t sure whether we should return to the rules of the retreat or whether I should respond. This retreat so reminded me of the Maine Meetinghouse. We sat in a circle with our thoughts and watched the snow fall or the leaves change outside until some gentle voice had something to say.
You were waiting for a response.
So I tried asking, How was the flight? Did they applaud?
When we went on honeymoon, all the passengers applauded when we landed at El Dorado Airport in Bogotá. You applauded too, caught up in the crowd. All you needed to have a good flight was a neck pillow, some conversation, someone offering you gum, a screen, and a snack. The applause was gravy.
You didn’t ask to see photos. You don’t ask for before-and-afters of Keza.
I’m not interested in that. I don’t want to see—
You’re not interested in my recovery either.
I am. How was your flight? I asked again, stuck. I’m trying everything, Princess. I’m not into that kink stuff. You’re not into any stuff. You had looked at me sincerely at that point. I’m trying, Beckett.
Except therapy.
Let’s give this retreat a fair chance. I was whispering. Therapy is the next option.
Our final option, you said.
I sat on the thin mattress of my twin bed.
You said, You’re not the person I married.
You neither, I said. I didn’t defend myself, though, in my humble but expert opinion, I hadn’t changed much during our marriage. The Gluten situation was an outlier, not evidence of a pattern. I added, You look totally different.
Well, you said, unsure whether you were being insulted. I change on the outside and you change on the inside.
* * *
I crawled into a really dark headspace after that. I wanted to be buried, to literally lie in an open field and have someone shovel dirt over my body, snow over my face.
At the retreat, we were not allowed to compel others into joint activities, so I went on a night hike on my own. Mosquitoes were everywhere like a mist. At the trailhead, I recognized one of the retreat participants. I paced myself behind him. He looked like a treeplanter I knew twenty years ago, only exaggerated. The gap between his front teeth was wider, hairline pronounced, more deeply freckled, more sinewy—and as far as I could tell from his meals, vegan instead of vegetarian. Gluten would have been spraying his seltzer music if he were here. Block.
Ahead of me, Freckles picked huckleberries. He looked back and saw me, then remembering himself, looked down. When I worked as a treeplanter, the joke was that I’d keep planting all the way up to the Arctic if I could. When I worked at Home Depot, the joke was that I’d live in the store if they let me. I was a long-haul guy. You want to hear my theory about distance runners? The whole world was saturated with him. I wanted to go for a run now, over these roots, through the trail, but exercise was forbidden.
There was a tree with round leaves glittering in the breeze. I could use a puffpuff to get me to sleep.
Well before the Woods, in the last phase of our kitchen renovation, I hung up opaque plastic from the ceiling and barred you from entering. I served you your food in the living room or bedroom, brought you whatever you needed, washed the dishes. When I finished the reno, I covered your eyes from behind and marched you into the room for the big reveal. You reacted like a TV wife: Look at the counters, look at the shelves, oh, you didn’t cheap out on the backsplash, the sink is so deep, the ugly dishwasher is gone. The next day, you took your parents on a video tour of the kitchen and dragged me onscreen to accept their praises. Your happiness was everything to me. Who would have thought this Cinderella from Maine would ever deserve the attention, let alone the affection of a woman like you, Princess. You didn’t make me the happiest man in the world. Who could measure that? You made me normal.
