The thing that’s worrying me tonight, even more than thinking I don’t have anything to write about: What if after twelve years together we don’t have anything to talk about, either?
It’s Saturday and we’re sitting in the car in the parking lot at 4:50 in the afternoon, just as the sunset starts to darken the clouds above the restaurant. This is one of our favorite places, but it’s looking a little lonely today, set on the edge of the quiet road, and livened only by the twinkling white lights wrapped around the front railing.
“You ready to go in?” says my spouse Janyce, starting to unbuckle her seatbelt and open the car door.
“No, not yet. Our reservation isn’t until 5pm.”
“Yeah, but I see people standing in the doorway already,” she says.
“Let’s just wait, it’s so early,” I say, and take out my phone to snap an Instagram of the empty parking lot and the sunset beyond.
“You want me to leave the car running while we wait?” she says.
I’m silent, looking down at the picture I just snapped, only to look up again as a car pulls up to park a few spaces in front of us. An elderly man gets out and walks around the back of the car to open the side door for his wife and help her with her walker.
“Really?” I say. “It’s bad enough we are eating dinner at 5pm.”
“Let’s just go in. We’ll make everyone else feel young. I’m hungry,” she says.
I don’t know why I’m complaining. I picked the 5pm dinner time because once it’s dark, who really cares anyway? “And we can come back and start a fire in the fireplace,” I said the previous morning when I made the reservation.
We agreed that we’d celebrate our anniversary in a practical fashion this year. We’d go to the family Cape house with the dog, work on our computers by the fireplace, take long walks on the beach, eat at one of our favorite restaurants. But I’m feeling a bit down now that we’ve put the weekend into motion. Something is missing but I’m not sure what it is.
A writer friend of mine who lives in another state sent me an email that I read this morning asking me some questions: Do you feel a sigh of relief when you finish a blog? A sense of accomplishment? How do you put one foot in front of the other with the other parts of your daily life?
Those are good questions, and I’d like to be able to answer her by saying, “Yes, I love writing them, and once I’m done, I can put it all away, pick up another part of my life and be fully present. But the truth is, I immediately start worrying that I don’t have anything to write about only a day later on a Sunday, a little bit of dread creeping back and a voice inside saying, you realize you will need to think about all of life’s minutia again any minute now.
Another one of my artist friends sent me an Instagram message telling me how much he liked my latest few blog posts, “Your weekly writing has inspired me,” he said. “I’ll be making my silkscreen this week, and I’ll follow up to show you the results.”
“Just one selfie,” I say to Janyce at the table while we are waiting for the salad to come. We’re at a booth in a room designed to look like a wine cellar, surrounded by those squat Italian-style wine bottles with the raffia wrapped bottoms. Our waitress can see us struggling to take a picture without the flash and she offers to take one for us. Both of us scoot close to each other on one side of the booth and smile.
A few years into our relationship, we started to go out on Thursday date nights. In the beginning, every date night was sexy, conversations were a revelation at times, even something as simple as the hot bar at the grocery store could be hilarious. And then, to guard against it all becoming too routine as the years passed, I introduced the random word generator. We would take turns on opposite months planning the date night for the other. The trick was to make the night relate in some way to the two words that were randomly chosen. One time, I had terminus grasshopper. Another time, Janyce had germ patrol. It’s funny how great those nights turned out. We looked forward to them. They were silly, sweet, and always wildly creative. It’s been a while since we’ve gone on one of those special date nights.
Janyce has since moved back to her side of the booth. “You can both sit on the same side if you want,” says the waitress. “Nah,” we both say back at the same time.
The thing that’s worrying me tonight, even more than thinking I don’t have anything to write about: What if after twelve years together we don’t have anything to talk about, either?
I am grateful to be married to someone who is thoughtful enough to deliver coffee to me every morning and who will agree to disagree when we have a rare argument, urging me to wait and talk about it later. The flip side of all that comfort and caretaking, though, is that the mystery goes away while the daily routines of life take over, and you have to coax it back. Sometimes you have to do more than coax, too. Sometimes it takes the most ridiculously contrived date night antics, but more often it just means noticing the small things and making them big.
“You know, we didn’t even get each other cards this year,” I say once we’re back home and Janyce is stoking the fire.
“You’re right, we didn’t,” says Janyce. “I don’t like that.”
The author Elizabeth Gilbert promotes a surprising idea about creativity in her book Big Magic. She considers ideas to be living things unto themselves — just out there for the taking. You don’t generate them from inside, but instead you make yourself attractive and available for them to come to you. While it’s a fanciful idea, it has me thinking a lot about how much it actually applies to some creative ideas I’ve had in the past. It also has me thinking that maybe this is a part of what’s missing between us on our weekend.
I have another friend who is a photographer with a fine art boudoir photography business. “What are you waiting for?” she said to me when I commented on her Facebook page. “About 30 pounds,” I wrote back.“You’re missing the point of boudoir. It’s not about how much you weigh...it’s about your sensuality as a human being,” she said. She’s right of course, and I know for a fact that she takes the best care of the women who come to her studio, getting them to step out of their comfort zone and dare to surprise themselves a little.
The thing is, my “sensuality as a human being” has taken a huge hit lately, first with a breast cancer diagnosis and surgery, and then with the wonders of hot flashes, sleepless nights, and more than a few pounds falling off and piling back on. Janyce has seen me in the same sweats and socks for the entire month of January. Even with an anniversary dinner planned, it was all I could do to pull on a favorite swingy shirt and run a little mascara on my lashes. Gilbert says, “When I feel like my creativity is hiding from me, I’ll go look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Why wouldn’t creativity hide from you, Gilbert? “Look at yourself!’” She has a point. But I think it’s more than that, too. It has something to do with being willing to crack open your life and see the things that are not working anymore. It means letting yourself be vulnerable.
Bags of groceries line the floor against the cabinets in the kitchen. It’s a midweek evening after work and I’m chopping herbs at the cutting board while Janyce is arriving from the garage with the dog on his leash.
“I’m throwing together a chicken blanquette,” I say. “If you want we can take a bowl with us and watch the latest L Word we missed over the weekend.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she says.
I’ve been entertaining this nascent idea over the past half hour, one that just came to me from out of nowhere while I was stirring the bubbling pot and dicing a small pile of tarragon leaves. What if we visit Embrace Studios together? I bet my talented friend could handle a female couple session. I’ve been resisting the idea of draping myself in yards of shiny satin with only my clavicle showing in the candle light, but I could imagine Janyce’s muscles and tattoos strategically positioned as the perfect complement to some of the curves I might be brave enough to bare. Maybe.
“You know, the writing in this show is just not that great sometimes,” I say, while resting my legs over Janyce’s legs on the couch, our bowls of stew finished and the season finale credits just starting to roll.
“Yeah I agree. But now we’re committed to it,” says Janyce.
“I kinda want to know what happens,” I say. “I thought Bette would be mayor, I thought Alice would lose her partner to the ex-wife, and both of those things didn’t happen. Honestly, the cheesy cliff hanger is kind of brilliant.”
“How so?” says Janyce.
“Well, because no matter which one Sophie chooses—Finley or Dani—I’m going to be surprised either way.”