Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

“Because I want to fill in the blank spaces, remind you of how you loved me, how we loved each other. I think I can do that. I want to remind you of your memories of us, of who we were.” He clears his throat, almost back together now. “Of who we are.”

I don’t say that I’ve already employed Jamie to do this. I want to say this, but somewhere tucked very, very deep inside of me, a surprising voice urges me not to. That the heartbreak has been enough for now and that maybe he knows this without my saying so. That I can still be furious and disgusted, and yet also let it go, if only for this hour. The new me. Softened, with her slightly rose-tinted glasses.

“Please,” he says, sensing my hesitation. “Nell. I’ll do anything.”

I sigh and notice the clock in the corner. It’s only 8:35 p.m. Jamie won’t be on TV until morning and Anderson has gone to rehab and I need the nurse to reload the next Friends DVD anyway and I’ve listened to my iPod so many times today that the battery is depleted beyond a quick recharge. So what else do I have to do with my time?

I close my eyes and envision picking up my distrust, my rage, and setting it aside, like a tumor carved out by a surgeon.

“Fine,” I say. “Tell me. Tell me our story. Though I can’t make any promises that it will help.”

“Have a Little Faith in Me”

—Joe Cocker

Peter chews his bottom lip. You can tell that he wants to pick the best place to start because he has so much riding on this. That if he inadvertently chooses the wrong place to begin, she’ll never concede, never look at him the way she once did, never, of course—and this is all that mattered—take him back.

She stares at him expectantly, but only for a few moments. Then she flicks her eyes away and rolls her jaw around, as if she’s reconsidering, but then she finds her way back toward him, breathing and waiting and breathing.

He flicks off his baseball cap, runs his fingers through his hair that the low-pressure hotel shower did no favors to, and inhales. And then he begins.

“I should start at our wedding,” he says, unintentionally nodding, like he’s reassuring himself even more so than he’s reassuring her. He knows how much he has to lose here. He knows that he can’t return to that shitty one-bedroom apartment that he rented when she kicked him out. The type that you lease just out of college and erect a plaster wall in the living room to create an extra bedroom for your just-as-broke roommate. Where the residents are a decade younger and stumble in from walks of shame while he’s already heading out to work in the morning, reminding him of his lost youth and, well, of how the rest of him has been pretty lost, too. “Let’s start at our wedding because, well, really, I know it’s cliché and all, but it was the best day of my life”—he clears his throat—“of our lives.”

Was it really the best day of hers? He doesn’t know. But there are enough land mines to avoid in the stories of their life together, and this one seems safe, a round, comforting place to get a toehold.

“I saw the pictures,” she says, and he hesitates again, unsure if she’s simply making conversation or if she’s trying to make this harder on him.

“I know, I know.” His head bobbles up and down. “But they can’t convey how great it was, how seriously magical it was.”

“Magical?” she says, and stifles a laugh.

His ears burn when she laughs at him, though he’s used to it all the same. She was never the kindest of wives, not the type who rubbed his feet nightly on the couch, not the type who relied on him day in and day out, leaning on his shoulder when the chips crumbled. No, she was the mother ship and he was her wake—though she didn’t look over her shoulder too often to ensure that he hadn’t drowned while swimming behind her. At first, it had worked well, this configuration: his friends told him how lucky he was, that his wife let him have endless guys’ nights, that she wasn’t clingy and begging him for a baby when he wasn’t yet ready. And sure, he loved his guys’ nights and was as appreciative as any new husband would be that his days hadn’t been totally upended because they swapped vows. But, let’s face it, he told himself about a year ago in the mirror while shaving, “You are a guy who likes to be needed, and she, well, she didn’t really need anyone,” so their banter grew less funny and more acerbic, and one thing led to another and, eventually, that led to Ginger, his coworker.

“Say what you want, mock me if you must,” he says today in the hospital, holding his ground, trying to forget all about Ginger. Ginger! The massive fucking mind-blowing mistake of Ginger. “Our wedding was magical.”

He pauses, and she smiles, and he can tell that she’s not being cruel now, not mocking him like maybe she would have before, so he smiles back. She seems different, he thinks—happier, less angry despite the circumstances. Then he worries that he’s pushing his luck, jinxing himself. Like your wife surviving a plane crash isn’t lucky enough and that hoping it’s somehow changed her for the better is just too much, pushing the Vegas odds too far in the wrong direction.

“We got married in Saint Lucia in April. April twenty-third. Your mom tried to talk us out of it—she wanted us to do it in her backyard or even at your dad’s old studio in Vermont, but you fought her on it. You were very, very sure of Saint Lucia.”

“Why Saint Lucia?”

He shrugs. “I suppose it was anywhere your mother, well, I don’t know, and your dad—reminders of him or whatever—were not. And hell, I didn’t care where we got married. But you cared—you cared about that, and you cared about our music. So I just shut up and did what I was told.”

“Joe Cocker,” she says, because her sister had told her.

“Joe Cocker,” he says back, then sings a line, embarrassed at himself but desperate all the same. “‘Give these loving arms a try, baby, and have a little faith in me.’” He veers slightly off-key, but it’s not a half-bad rendition. Not her perfect-pitch level, but still, not awful.

She stares at him for a beat, and he steels against it, ready for the mockery. But instead, she squints and says, “Just put a tux on you and you’ll be there,” like this is an inside joke of theirs, which it was, even though she can’t remember.

“Yep. Exactly! That’s more or less what I said.” Peter grins now, genuinely, less nervously, and she can see, for one of the first times, how he is handsome beyond the generically handsome way that he already is. In the tiny folds around his eyes, in the dimple that craters into his left cheek. He is almost large enough to be oafish, but bent over in his chair, he looks more compact, less imposing, and she can see that way back when, maybe in high school, his size would have made him the lead tackle on the football team rather than just the biggest guy at a cocktail party, which he probably is these days.

“It was a small wedding—we invited only fifty or so, and about thirty made their way down. But you wanted it private and not a big to-do, and again, your mom wanted two hundred, but this was all the hotel could accommodate, so you won that argument in the end.”

“Up on the cliff,” she says. “There’s a picture here somewhere of the wedding—we got married up on a cliff?”

“Yes, yes,” he says, a wave of momentum building in his voice. “It had rained about an hour earlier and you were devastated—sitting in your room getting ready with Rory and Samantha and your mom and sobbing because it turns out that the weather was the one aspect you couldn’t control—but then it cleared up right before we started.” He smiles now, lost in the vision of what he’s trying to re-create for her. “And you—and this is the part that I’ll never forget. You surprised me with your guitar. For the first time in forever, you played, much less played for me. I still—to this day—don’t know how you got that guitar down to Saint Lucia without my noticing.” He floats his eyes down to meet hers. “I don’t know. It was just, like, out of a movie or something. The clouds rolled out, and the sun came through, and you were making music for me again, and it felt like God was watching down on us.”