In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(2)
For the trip to JFK, we didn’t use Arnold, the guy who always drives our car to the airport and returns it to our driveway. Arnold’s been driving us, and our kids and grandkids, for six years, and he has shared with us all about his love of motorcycles, his sobriety, and his wife’s health issues, to balance, I think, all the information he has about us, whether he’s wanted it or not. I could not bear to lie to Arnold about where we are going and I cannot bear to tell him the truth and I could not come up with a half-truth (the favorite technique of serious liars) about why we are going to Zurich in late January. For the skiing? For the ice fishing? For the Chagall windows in Fraumünster Church? I was afraid that Arnold would watch us sympathetically in the rearview mirror, and I could not bear it, for Brian’s pride and my general soft-boiledness, and just as I could not bear any harshness at all, I didn’t think I could take kindness, either. I wanted absolutely nothing, a blanket of indifference, and that was exactly what we got from the driver of our local limo service. He spoke once in the two-and-a-half-hour drive. Perfect.
At JFK, we stood mid–Terminal 4 and agreed on the restaurant, nicer than Shake Shack (which I love and Brian does not) but not as nice as the Palm steakhouse, which seems insanely high-priced, but as I’m writing this, I remember that we did go to the Palm, after all, because…obviously.
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Brian ordered everything he wanted—and, it seemed to me, everything that anyone can imagine ordering—at the Palm steakhouse at JFK, except vodka on the rocks, which he had been mentioning wanting from time to time for the last year or so.
At the Palm, Brian ordered onion rings and a rare rib eye with a side of hash browns and a Caesar salad and garlic toast and he would have ordered a shrimp cocktail, except that I whispered, like the circa-1953 stage Jewish wife I seem to have become, missing only my home perm and rickrack-trimmed apron: Really? Shrimp in a steak place, in an airport? Brian shrugged, to say: I’m not that excited about airport shrimp anyway and, also, what’s the worst that could happen? I could have a bite, and it’s meh, and then I wouldn’t eat it. Waste of money, so what? I could die from bad shrimp, and wouldn’t that save us all a lot of trouble? Or I could get food poisoning and have to miss the flight. At this, he folded the menu and looked at me the way he often did now, with resigned understanding, fatigue, a little worn humor.
I teared up all through dinner, with Brian occasionally patting my hand. I kept crying because I loved him and his appetites and all the sensuality and good humor and heat-seeking that went with them.
Sorry I Missed Your Call For a little while, in 2007, Brian and I were bicoastal. I worked in L.A. on a short-lived TV show. He flew in from Hartford, right after work, every two weeks, took a quick nap in my office on Friday night, and woke up to have dinner with me and whoever was still around. He read multiple drafts of each week’s show and watched the scenes when he could. He’d find a corner to sit in and take note of everything—costume, makeup, rehearsal, petty disagreements. He loved each surreal and complex part of shooting a show. One weekend, Brian woke up early and came back with an inflatable raft. He asked me to make sandwiches and drove us to the set in Burbank. He chatted up the security guard, who waved us in. We spent most of the day in and around a real pool, ate a real lunch, and lounged in the sun in our beautiful fake world. When we left, Brian handed the security guard the bottle of white wine he’d chilled for him in the pool.
Two years ago, I gave Brian a new script of mine to read, and my husband, my cheerleader, TV-lover, inveterate script-reader, the man who half-hoped we’d wind up in Silver Lake and not Stony Creek, Connecticut, didn’t read it. In the years we were together, Brian read everything I’d ever written, within days of my finishing. After a week, I asked about the TV script. Brian said that he hadn’t gotten around to it. He sounded a little puzzled. Weeks went by and he didn’t mention it. I steeled myself and asked him about it again and he said, with no chagrin and not much interest, that the format was too difficult to follow. He left it lying on the bedroom floor, until I took it back to my office.
Sunday, January 26, 2020, Zurich
At the JFK Palm, we ate and tipped well and then found our way to the Swissair lounge, which had been moved temporarily to the very distant lounge of Emirates Airline, where the female staff at the front desk combined brisk efficiency with an unmistakable nod to deference (an actual repeated head-duck) in their dealings with Brian. I got a bland sideways smile. I handled the tickets and I handled the passports and still, the longer we stood there, the more what-else-can-I do-for-you-Mr.-Ameche there was. Nothing comparable came my way. Brian did not mind. Even I didn’t mind. Patriarchy, and my handsome husband, whaddayagonnado?
The lounge was clean and there was a lot of fruit and all sorts of buffet dishes—proper Middle Eastern, Italian-ish, French-ish—and a bustling bar. Brian snagged a big ball of falafel as we got settled. It wasn’t stealing, of course, but I didn’t think it was polite to reach out with your big fingers into the pile, when there were silver tongs, tiny forks, small plates, and matching small three-ply paper cocktail napkins waiting. Brian didn’t care if it was rude, and the not caring wasn’t a function of Alzheimer’s. He had never cared.
We each have things we do that the other person finds faintly shocking. At home, I go outside to get the newspaper in what I call my pajamas—a ratty T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts from college, rather than some fetching pink-piped set. We have neighbors. People can and do see me. I don’t care. Brian was always, truly, appalled. He thought it was low-rent and, although he would never use the word, slatternly. (After the neurologist’s appointment, he said, Why confuse people? Why make them think there are two people with Alzheimer’s in the house? And we did both laugh and I still dash out of the house on Sunday mornings.) We are, my daughter the psychologist tells me, people with traces of mild sociopathy. I don’t disagree.