Gary looks down at all our stuff, then at the clock on the desk—it’s almost 10:00 P.M.—and then out the window. It’s pitch-black out, and he can just make out the car under a big white rising moon. He picks up all of our bags at once and, with his free hand, lifts me by the elbow. It seems we’re leaving early.
* * *
We tiptoe down the stairs and edge around the kitchen door. Andy is clearing the table and Gregory and Sari are drinking wine and talking in hushed tones—their practice of “checking in” with each other after students have left for the night, both of them glowing from the activity of creativity, from the apparent joy they take in the community of artists and writers they’ve built; in the people who come and go from their house struggling to express themselves. All I feel is loneliness—every cell in my body and brain is empty and devoid of what’s supposed to connect me to the rest of the world—and to Gary—and I am full of a strange new grief, that of a nonjoiner who suddenly sees what they’ve been missing out on all these years: community, connection, the quiet comfort of others.
But there is no time. With the stealth movements of a scene from a Bourne movie, Gary signals for me to follow him down a few more stairs, into the “car-barn,” otherwise known as a garage. There are the three cars—the SUV that Sari drove to the cheese store, the BMW Gary refused to drive, and the white Prius Gregory drove earlier. He takes a set of keys off a nail on the wall and pops open the Prius’s trunk, then loads our bags in. He motions for me to get into the car, and then he does, and, with a press of the “start” button, the dashboard lights up. Gary turns off the interior lights and the headlights and backs out of the garage without a sound. In our perfect battery-operated getaway vehicle we float silently down the lawn all the way to the Volvo.
With everything transferred into our car, and the keys left in the ignition of the Prius, Gary leans in through the driver’s door and puts the Volvo into neutral, runs to the back of the wagon and pushes it down the road past Sari’s house. Once we’re in the clear, Gary gets behind the wheel and shifts the car into drive. At the end of Sari’s road, he guns it toward the highway. I enter our destination—Home—into his phone, then put it on the holder on the dashboard. In seconds it lights up with our mapped route. We’ll get back just after midnight.
* * *
In the dark silence between us I remember another similarly dramatic night-escape—years ago, before Teddy was born, when we visited a college friend of mine in Maine. Clara had invited me countless times to see the beach house that had been in her family for generations, and one summer weekend a year after I’d met Gary, I finally agree. I print out her directions and pack up the car. I promise him that it will be fun.
Gary only reluctantly agrees to go—he prefers the impersonal feel of hotels to the awkward closeness of staying with friends—travel in general and being in situations he can’t control, like being someone’s houseguest, makes him extremely anxious—but as we get off the highway north of Portland and follow the coastal roads into town and toward a huge shingled house on a craggy hill, he suddenly perks up.
“See?” I say. “And you didn’t want to go.”
But then we pull into the driveway and arrive at the back of the house, which is a dump. Gary parks on a burned mound of dry grass next to two dead station wagons and several feral cats. The cats glare at us, and then Gary glares at me. “We’re not staying. You know I can’t handle this kind of thing. The unknown, the unclean, the unsafe.”
Clara, plain and preppy in flat sandals and a faded Lilly Pulitzer–style skort, comes running out to greet us before we can plot the details of an escape. She takes us through the back of the house—from the kitchen that hasn’t been touched since the avocado-green-and-brown-appliance-seventies, to a grand foyer where flies enter in through a sagging screen door, to an upstairs guest room. Inside the bedroom with sea foam–green walls, Gary’s eyes fixate on the bed itself: a mattress on the floor, a short stack of stained pancake-thin pillows waiting for pillowcases; the buzzing of bees and more flies outside in the dead summer heat.
Clara adjusts the window fan leaning up against a broken screen like a scrappy nurse improving the angle of a bed or a splinted limb. “If you just angle it like this,” she says, almost pushing it out the window, “you can get a nice cross breeze. And it keeps the mosquitoes from coming in. Who needs air-conditioning?”
“Not me!” Gary says theatrically, hitting his head on the swaying chain hanging from a bare lightbulb on the ceiling. He grits his teeth then digs his nails deep into the soft flesh of my palm. “We’re leaving,” he mouths.
“I know,” I mouth back.
It only gets worse when Clara leaves us alone. “Oh look, Judy!” Gary shrieks. “A litter box! In our bedroom!” He covers his eyes with both hands. “We’re not staying. I can’t sleep here. I won’t sleep here. It’s hot. There are mosquitoes. And—”
“I get it, Gary. Don’t panic. I’ll think of something.”
We hug, then laugh hysterically into each other’s necks, trying to snuff out Gary’s rising anxiety, which lasts until after dinner, when we go back to our room and pretend to go to sleep for the night. Instead, in the moonlight, with the bleating of crickets in the background, Gary and I, much like we did tonight, tai chi our way out of the guest room, down the stairs, and out the kitchen door to the car. If Gary hadn’t knocked over a trash can while I left a note on the kitchen table, thanking Clara for her hospitality and apologizing for our hasty departure, we would have made a clean getaway. Instead, we peel out of the driveway while all the lights in the house go on. Seconds later, driving on a road that traces the ocean like a finger, we stop at the first beach parking lot we pass.
“What did you say in the note?” Gary asks, breathless, tearing at my clothes.
“That you forgot your little Claus von Bülow bag of insulin,” I say, tearing at his.
“Diabetes! Brilliant!”
* * *
Tonight, in the dark of this autumn evening, we drive under another giant moon, but we will not pull off the road after this escape the way we did then; we will not tear each other’s clothes off. I watch Gary drive, study his face lit by the yellowy lights of the dashboard and briefly by the occasional oncoming car for clues for what to say.
“What’s wrong with us?” I whisper. I’m not sure if Gary doesn’t answer because he hasn’t heard me or because he doesn’t know how to answer. “We’re not like other people. We’re always escaping. We’re always fleeing in the middle of the night.”
“No we’re not like other people. And maybe you’d be better off if you finally accepted that.”
“Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I don’t want to be different.”
“But you are different, Judy. You have a different kind of marriage than most people have. And so do I. Maybe we both wish we didn’t—maybe we both wish we had a ‘normal’ marriage, whatever that is—but we don’t, and that’s how it is. That’s our reality. The longer you fight it, the worse it will be. For you. For me. And for Teddy.” He shakes his head. “I get it. I get that Sorry and her stupid husband have it easier than we do, or seem to anyway. I get that it sucks about Glenn—there is no justice when it comes to who lives and who dies—but you still could have used this weekend to jump-start your work. But maybe me being there ruined it for you, so you just shut down and didn’t even try.”