It’s not enough. My response is yet another disappointment. He turns away from me and, instead, turns back to his group. I get a funny feeling that we have crossed a line—as if something has shifted and he knows, finally, that who I once was is gone for good, that I’m never coming back.
After lunch, when we return to the afternoon session, I can only come up with a half-finished paragraph and a stick-figure sketch about the torture of writer’s block. When it’s my turn to share, I clear my throat, but nothing comes out.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Yes you can,” Sari says. “Just relax.”
I glance over at Gary for some encouragement, but he looks away, refusing to meet my eye. He’s done. I’m on my own. I stare at my pad again, but still nothing. “No. I really can’t.”
“Okay, Judy.” Sari turns to the woman next to me. “Go ahead, Ann, brave-warrior-soul.”
And just like that, I’m off the hook.
* * *
We’re back in our room, getting ready to go to the big group dinner to celebrate the completion of the first day of our Noble Journey. Gary’s pawing through his small overnight bag, trying to decide which sweater to change into, when I tell him that I think Sari’s methods are a crock. “When I said I couldn’t read my thing, she should have pushed me. Instead, she took the easy way out and just went on to the next person.”
He stares at me. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Actually, I’m not.”
“It’s not Sari’s job to push you, Judy. It’s your job to push yourself.”
“No, actually, I’m here because I paid her to push me. If I could push myself to write I’d have stayed home!” He shakes his head, which only makes me dig in more. “Look, just because you were the star of the day with your song doesn’t mean that her approach works across the board. Not everyone can just perform on cue.”
“Judy. I haven’t ‘performed on cue’ for almost ten years. You know what a big deal that was for me. You know how I battle in my head to get through every single day.”
“I do know,” I say quietly. “And I admire you for it.”
“I don’t want your admiration. I want something else.”
I sit down on the bed. I don’t know what that means and I’m really not ready to find out. The idea of leaving the room is suddenly more than I can handle and I tell Gary that I’m going to skip the dinner. “Just tell Sari that I don’t feel well. Which is actually the truth.”
“Good. I’ll go alone. Which will make me feel less alone than if you were there but not really there with me.”
* * *
It’s quiet after Gary leaves. Too quiet. I look around the room and realize Sari was right—it’s a beautiful space: high ceilings, big windows with the same kitchen view of rolling fields; linen couches and overstuffed armchairs and walls of bookshelves. For the first time since we got here, I touch things—big glass paperweights, the topstitching on throw pillows, the frames of happy-couple family photographs—and I’m sad suddenly, missing Teddy, and the dog, and Glenn. I’m just about to open a desk drawer out of habit—I’ve always been a compulsive snoop, curious to know the mundane things about people—what they eat, what they read, how they arrange their clothes and their closets, the kind of toothpaste and floss they use—my fingers are looped around a heavy brass drawer-pull when Andy appears in the doorway with a dinner tray.
“Looking for something?” she says eyeing me, before explaining the soup. “Sari said your husband said you didn’t feel well.”
I know that if her hands were free she would have pumped air quotes around that entire sentence. I drop my hand from the drawer-pull. “Just chocolate!” I lie.
“You won’t find any in this house. Skin and Bones wouldn’t eat chocolate unless her pills were covered in it.”
We have a nickname. I can’t wait to tell Gary. When we start speaking to each other again.
Andy puts the tray on the desk, then bends down and slowly slides the bottom left-hand drawer open. She reaches in, behind what looks like a stack of envelopes, and pulls out a fat white joint. “Is this what you were looking for?” I don’t answer, so she sniffs the rolled joint, lights it, takes a long slow drag, then hands it to me. After all the times I’ve said no to Gary, I take it from her without hesitation. Why not? It’s been a shitty day. I take a second drag when that’s offered, too, but refuse a third.
“So tell me about these people, Andy. Sari and Gregory.” I lean back against the desk, and close my eyes. Something is definitely happening to my brain already.
“You don’t need me to tell you what your eyes can plainly see.”
I inhale, then nod. “They seem like such phonies. Such narcissists. Peddling confidence and snake oil and big dreams to the disenfranchised and downtrodden.”
Andy raises an eyebrow. “Don’t get crazy.”
“Sorry. I mean, the creatively disenfranchised and downtrodden.”
She stares at me and shrugs. “All I know is that they’re in the business of telling people what they want to hear and these people are hungry for it. They eat it up.”
“I hate myself for being here.”
“Then why did you come?”
I tell her that I came because I’m desperate, that I’m stuck, that I have writer’s block. I tell her that I know it sounds like a First World Problem except that it’s how I used to earn a living, for my family. I try to guess Andy’s age—she’s probably twenty-five, or twenty-eight, definitely under thirty. She probably has no idea what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t have at that age. “This was a last-ditch effort to restart my career, but I barely wrote anything today, despite a million different prompts that seemed to work for everyone else. Including my husband, who was the star of the day. And he wasn’t even supposed to be here!”
Andy says that I sound pissed. And I guess I am. I’d wanted some time to myself, to clear my head. But there we were, attached at the hip, as always. It’s such a shitty, ungenerous thought to have so I tell myself it’s the pot talking.
“Some couples like that togetherness-thing,” she says. “You must like it, on some level, if you ended up here together.” I shrug, and then she shrugs, and then she says she’s not interested in any of that straight-cis-married-shit. “I’m single. By choice.”
“You’re smart.”
“I know.”
“You have no idea.”
“I do.”
“You should stay that way.”
“I will.”
* * *
In minutes, after she leaves, I feel awful for being so unkind about Gary’s breakthrough, especially since I only want him to do well, to thrive, to conquer his anxiety. I just wish that we both had it easier. I often wonder, as I do right now, if I’d known how much Gary and his anxiety might eclipse me—that being in his orbit might pull me away from my work, my thoughts, my own private world, the dissociated place in my head I’d always gone to that made it possible for me to think and work—whether I still would have married him. I think back often to the beginning, to when Gary and I first met, as if there is an answer I will find there. If I’d known how hard things would be now, would I have made the same choice? Would he? Doesn’t every married person ask themselves this question?