Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

She let out a dark laugh. “What isn’t?”

For some reason, I had the inexplicable urge to tell her that I wished she and I were less complicated. I wanted her to hear me say that. But that would have been a clear violation of our tacit, long-standing agreement to allow all our angst, hope, dread, joy, grief, guilt, and panic to jumble around of their own kinetics, largely unexamined.

“You’re a musician, Teddy. That was your life until your luck ran out. And then you evolved. I hope you haven’t been unhappy all these years, but by the same token, it would be perfectly natural to fantasize about going back to that world, especially since you would’ve preferred not to have left it in the first place.”

I tossed the microphone cable toward my trusted old bag of gear. It was blue and faded and the fabric was unraveling on the sides where the boxlike tuners and guitar pedals pressed against it. It was the same bag I’d lugged around to gigs in college. It used to smell of stale beer. Now it smelled like the back of my shoe closet.

I took a seat next to her on the sofa. “Have you ever wanted to do something different?” I asked her, exploring the weary curve of her spine. “Have you ever felt the itch to change?”

She tilted her head downward, peering at me over a pair of invisible spectacles. “I’m not restless like you. When I feel the urge to change, I explore a new design style or I buy myself a new outfit, or we plan a trip and disappear off the face of the earth for a week. That’s probably as much redefinition as I’ve got in me at this point.”

I didn’t say anything. As she stared at me, I knew she wanted to ask me if she was one of the things I wanted to change. She had to be wondering what it was in my life, or absent from it, that was leading me down this path.

“Speaking of change.” She slapped a hand on each of her thighs, something people tended to do before standing. But she didn’t move. “Sometimes it comes looking for you , not the other way around.”

I had the notion she was speaking of present tenses, and I felt the air in the room thicken.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

“Okay.”

I waited in the pregnant silence as she gathered herself.

“Billy called me.”

“Billy. Your Billy?”

“Yeah.” She looked away. “He wants a divorce.”

That, I did not see coming. But somebody should have. Sara and Billy didn’t last very long after the accident, the marriage falling into a slow, methodical disintegration. One detail left unattended in their mutual flight, however, was their marital status. Over the years I’d wondered just how accidental that was, if maybe, on a subconscious level, a divorce would’ve been the final hammer swing on the life they once shared, and neither of them had it in them to do it.

Her being married never factored into our relationship because I never threatened to make Sara a bigamist (my starter marriage having been an event I wasn’t keen on replicating) and Sara, for her part, seemed preoccupied with just making it through the day. It was a perverse sort of equilibrium, mutually assured purgatory.

Sara and I spoke of marriage exactly once. It was on a Sunday morning, a year after she’d moved in. As I pounded a ketchup bottle over an omelet, I offhandedly asked if she thought we’d ever get married. It wasn’t a proposal; it was for discussion purposes only. I merely wanted to know where her head was on the issue, like if she thought we’d ever sail the Strait of Magellan or if she reckoned Puerto Rico might one day become a state. She looked out the window for a long moment. Then she asked if that was something I really wanted to discuss. I took it as a rebuke, but have since wondered if she was truly posing a question. I honestly can’t remember it ever coming up again.

“Why now?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. He may be involved with someone and . . . I don’t know.” The thought dissolved into the air between us.

“Is he getting remarried?”

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think that’s what’s driving this.”

“Wow, Sara.” I stared at her, weighing the many questions I could’ve asked. “So, what was it like, speaking to him after all these years?” I assumed it had been years, although there really was so much about Sara Rome I didn’t know.

“It was strange. Needless to say, his call caught me off guard. Just hearing the sound of his voice knocked me a little. We kept it superficial—­our jobs, our families, things like that. Then he said he thinks we need to, you know, make it official because of how long it’s been. And one day one of us might want to get married again.”

She didn’t personalize it. The remarrying didn’t necessarily involve me.

“How are you with all that?”

She shrugged with a woman’s natural pragmatism. “It makes sense.”

“Yeah,” I agreed softly. “I suppose it does.”

Sara never talked about Billy and I never inquired, assuming any thought of him would carry her to thoughts of Drew, a topic strictly off-limits. But now that I thought about it, there had been one instance. Late one night, soon after she’d moved in, I sensed an emptiness in the bed and, half-asleep, went looking for her in the predawn chill. I found her crumpled on the kitchen floor, the phone to her ear, sobbing to Billy. When her wet, puffy eyes flickered my way, it was only to convey that I wasn’t part of this. This didn’t involve me.

“So, what do we do now?” I said to her. “Drink to our mutual upheaval?”

“A drink is a good idea.” She got up and dewrinkled those invisible creases in her pants. “But this divorce thing is not upheaval. It’s the opposite. It’s a settling down.”

She carried herself heavily into the kitchen. I continued to disassemble the room to the sound of a wine bottle being smoothly violated by a corkscrew.

As leisurely paced as this divorce might have been, it was sure to change things between us. It was a step in the direction of finality, of bringing to a close a chapter in her life. And endings tended to deposit you at the doorstep of some other beginning. What would Sara want to begin? This was something I’d never before needed to consider. I didn’t want Sara’s situation to push her away from me, but at the moment, given the left turn my life was potentially about to take, I wasn’t so sure I wanted it to nudge her much closer either.

This divorce was upheaval. It was upheaval precisely because it was a settling down.

She returned to the room cupping two stemless glasses, and held one out to me.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked her.

“I’m fine.” She looked battered. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Okay.” I reached out to tap my wineglass to hers.

“We’re drinking to you tonight, Teddy,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure. “I think we’re just drinking.”

I stood outside the house and pondered the consequences. There would be many. A blizzard of them, most of them unwelcome. Suddenly, a simple knock seemed a dire, drastic step. I’d come this far, I told myself, though really it hadn’t been very far at all.

Screw it.

I rapped twice on the door and a symphony of muted noises erupted behind it. Kitchen chairs skidded, skirmishing children trampled down carpeted steps. Finally, the door blew open and there I was, staring at Jumbo Jett.

We looked at each other, and his face, puffier than I’d remembered it, ballooned into a bulky smile. “Mingus.”

“Hello, Jumbo.”

He glanced over his shoulder, then scooted furtively out onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind him. Throwing an arm over my shoulder, he began guiding me back down the walk toward the street.