In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(3)

Brian scouted the lounge for a satisfactory pair of armchairs and dove into the New York and London Timeses. I don’t know what reading the papers means to him anymore: politics, a bit of sports news (a football player at Yale in his day, he refuses to watch college football now, upset at the lack of care for the players, but he still keeps track of which teams are doing what). Some tidbits about real estate or architecture or design used to catch his eye, from his forty years as an architect. He never comments anymore. He used to read me several paragraphs at a clip about things that struck him, and even more, he loved for me to read articles to him while he drove. I never read aloud to him enough to suit him, but I once did almost the entire Sunday Review while we pursued an unlikely five-star BBQ place on the other side of Connecticut. When I faltered on the last Op-Ed piece, he said, “Finish strong, darling.”

Brian folded up the newspapers to bring on the plane and then thought better of it. There was a whole style of planning, of near-hoarding of favorite things, of anticipating his own needs, which has been his way since we met. He never got into his car, from April to November, without making sure he had at least one of his lesser fishing rods and some flies in the trunk. He never left a restaurant without fistfuls of mints, to put in his nightstand, candy jar, and glove compartment. On this trip, he’s done. I give him a wad of Swiss francs. He knows where his medications are, plus his little vial of Viagra. If he doesn’t have it, he doesn’t need it. If I’m not carrying it, it’s not important.



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We take every little Swissair giveaway, for no reason, and we hang on to our carry-on bags. I have insisted that we don’t bring proper suitcases, because I will not lug home a large suitcase full of clothes he will never wear and medicines he will never take—while packing, Brian shook a bottle of ten Viagra at me like a maraca and said, This is worth something.

I won’t dump his clothes at the Swiss version of Goodwill and leave his meds for the cleaning staff. Basically, I just won’t deal with it, with “after.” After Brian has died and I have to leave him, my goal is to get myself on a plane with my friend who has offered to accompany me home. Then my daughter Sarah will meet me at the airport and Sarah and I will be met by my daughter Caitlin and the two of them will say good night to me and my fantasy is that I will fall into my bed and not get up for two weeks. This is absolutely not what happens. We have brought our crappiest carry-on bags, black briefcases that double as overnight bags from Brian’s business-travel days. Brian and I both hate the thought of throwing away a nice suitcase. Sociopaths, maybe, and given to splurging, yes, but not people who can throw out a barely used, unscratched, two-hundred-fifty-dollar suitcase.





The Book Brothers





When we moved to a small Connecticut village in 2014, Brian was invited to join a men’s book club. He was dubious because they seemed to prefer nonfiction and he did not, but he was pleased to be asked and he went regularly. He suggested a novel whenever it was his turn to suggest. They asked him why he wanted to be in their book club and he said, I love a good read and I love intimacy. He was pleased that they looked shocked, and he felt that he’d announced himself properly. Once in a while, he has coffee on a weekend with one of the guys. He says the books are usually too simple (“I don’t know. It’s about some horse who overcomes obstacles”) or sentimental (“Olympic team of rowers. They win”) for him, but he enjoyed the group and the chatting before and after until two years ago, when almost everything about the book club began to irritate him.

I hear him grumbling when the emails come in: There are too many schedule changes; he doesn’t know which house the meeting’s at and they expect him to know by now which man lives where, so they don’t always attach the address of the meeting. He goes to a meeting on the wrong night but he doesn’t mind, because a few months earlier, a “book brother” showed up at our house a week early. Brian tells me that one of the men he really likes, with whom he’d had lunch a couple of years ago, is moving out of town. I encourage Brian to call him for a last lunch, but he says that it’s too late, that the man has already moved away. One day, I look at Brian’s phone (I often find myself looking at Brian’s phone these last two years, but I pretend I don’t) and I see an email from the man who I thought moved away, putting in his pitch for the book he’d like the group to read. He has moved about ten minutes farther away and is still very much in the book club.

This fall, Brian has gotten the book for his book club (meaning, I picked it up from our library, across the street) and talks to me about it with enthusiasm. But I can see that not only does the bookmark not advance, it goes backward, every couple of days, to the first ten pages. He doesn’t go to the meeting and the book sits on his nightstand for months, even as we are packing for Zurich, because even when he sees it, it doesn’t matter, or he has forgotten about it, and because I cannot bear to touch or even mention it.





Monday, January 27, 2020, Zurich





We land in Zurich and the hotel’s car service takes us to the pretty hotel in the cobblestoned Old Town section. The city’s warmer than we expect, and it’s drizzling. The Widder is a bunch of old buildings pulled together into a posh hotel through oddly placed lifts and corridors, the kind of hotel we might choose for a holiday, although it has never occurred to either of us, ever, to go to Zurich. Every restaurant we pass is filled with couples, most of whom are apparently pairs of straight white men in business-ish clothes. Sometimes, they are foursomes. Occasionally, there is a businessman in his late sixties and a hot young thing in a silk minidress and strappy sandals (My God, I think, the cobblestones). Between Brian’s trouble with proprioception this past year—gashed his hand, slipped off the front porch, tumbled backward off a picnic bench—and my new-for-Zurich terror that he will slip and fall on the wet cobblestones of Old Town and we will not be able to get ourselves to Dignitas, the cobblestones—and conversations about cobblestones—loom very large on this trip.