Phoenix

The restaurant was French Cajun, New Orleans inspired. Spicy. I could smell the spiciness wafting from between the double doors of the kitchen, carried on the cold drafts of air blown in by new customers entering the lobby. The customers themselves were not spicy, at least not in the way people our age would understand it. I wondered at why so many white-haired patrons had chosen such a colorful, flavorful place for a night out.

“Everyone in here has at least twenty years on us,” you said.

I laughed. Of course we were thinking the same thing. “I wonder why that is. It’s not too overpriced to be a twenty-somethings date place.”

“It must just be the food then. That doesn’t make much more sense of it though.”

We sat in silence, observing as each new blast of cold air brought a tottering couple, leaning on each other’s arms. Sometimes families would come with their elderly parents and then the feeble would be leaning on young, impatient shoulders. I thought the old people always looked happier leaning on their just-as-shaky spouse. Maybe they could find joy knowing it was a mutual support, that they were carrying just as much as they were being carried.

You moved one finger from your armrest to gently stroke the back of my hand where it rested, conspicuously, only inches from yours. Usually, our hands are constantly entwined, without thought or even much sentimentality. I know, though you probably haven’t noticed, that when our hands are that close but not touching, our hearts are feeling an internal disconnect. But it was just my heart then, I think. You moved the rest of your fingers and laced them with mine on my armrest, not waiting for me to come to you. As usual. I felt like more penance of distance should be served before such an acceptance, more ceremony given to my forgiveness. I knew you felt there was no other place for your hand to be, nothing filling the six inches of empty space between our uncomfortable waiting area chairs. You were not thinking of me at all.

“I’m still sorry,” I said. I turned my eyes away from the lobby to search your face, guess your thoughts like I love to do because I can always surprise you with how much I know about you, things you don’t know about yourself.

“I know,” is all you said. Not bitter. Just focused on the present. Not thinking about me at all. Not considering the reasons why you should be afraid. I wished then and now it was that easy for me to do the same.

“It’s just a coffee pot,” I said, “If someone gets it for us, someone gets it for us. I shouldn’t have gotten angry. It wasn’t worth it.”

You turned and smiled. “I forgive you, Julie.” And then you went back to watching the room.

Again, my sense of payment had not been satisfied. I wanted a discussion, an argument, in which you proved to me that we needed a sixty dollar coffeemaker with a built-in water filter on our wedding registry instead of a regular, thirty dollar coffeemaker because the more expensive option really was the better one. I wanted you to battle me, humiliate me into submission, because at least then I could say I suffered for and learned from my brutal treatment of you. I wanted you to master me and my pettiness because I had proven yet again that I could not control it myself. But you had already passed beyond me.

Sometimes I wonder how you know when I’ve refused to let go of something. Maybe my eyes give it away, or maybe the wrinkle between my eyebrows. Maybe it was my hand, slackening its grip on yours.

You squeezed my hand twice and tried to meet my eyes. “What are you thinking about?”

I didn’t answer you immediately. I wanted to get to the heart of it, to eradicate the emptiness in my stomach once and for all by speaking it out loud into the life of the room. In the interlude, another old couple passed us, a man gently helping his wife with her coat.

“Are you never afraid?” I asked. I was afraid of your answer.

“About what?”

“About this. About us. Not working. Aren’t you ever afraid of everything falling apart?”

You squinted your eyes, which I know means that you’re considering your response carefully. I was relieved you were taking me seriously, not just brushing past the question like I knew I might have if you had asked me the same thing. I would have tried to laugh and given you the easy “I love you forever no matter what” answer, but it wouldn’t have satisfied, just like you wouldn’t have been able to pacify me with that answer either. I couldn’t accept such an easy love for the same reason I couldn’t accept such an easy forgiveness: it didn’t acknowledge the very real necessity of fear.

“No,” you said, “I’m not afraid of that at all.”

The fear covered my head like a black veil at my own funereal. You had left me alone to suffer in my doubts, thinking that I was the only one who really knew the danger, the only one who could see that if anyone was to end us, it would be me. All I wanted you to do was to take my place as the jailer of my self-made prison so I could rest for a while and just be the prisoner instead of jailer, builder, and prisoner, always, all at the same time.

“No, I’m not afraid of us ending,” you said. “I’m not afraid of you.” Of course you knew the real question I was asking. “But I am afraid of myself.”

“You too?” Sudden hope feels almost as painful as despair, or maybe the ache is caused by despair retreating, screaming on its way out.

“I’m not afraid of you, Julie. The only thing I have to be afraid of is myself.”

I’m glad the hostess called your name then. Otherwise I would have had to say something, and words would have been like small children chasing a bird, pulling out all the feathers of fragile beauty, destroying while trying to own what they are ruining.

We sat down at a small booth for two. You leaned across the table and pulled me close so you could whisper your secret thoughts in my ear, glinting behind your mischievous eyes. I thought you might give me a treasure from the deepest part of your heart, tell me the key to ridding me of my fear forever. I leaned in close for you to rescue me.

“So, before when I was standing in the hall outside the bathrooms waiting for you, there was a chest of drawers there and I wondered what a restaurant would keep in a chest of drawers. It’s not like you would keep the same stuff in it that you would in a house. So I looked in and found rubber gloves.” You shook with suppressed laughter and your whisper got even lower. “And I took a pair.”

Not the key I was expecting, but something close. I saw the flash of feathers as it flew, shaking ashes from its wings.