Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

Here on the couch, Peter still feels too big for me, just like he did the first time I saw him in the hospital room, but I’ve grown used to his meatiness now. Now, his oversize hands and biceps shaped like barrels, well, now they’re starting to provide comfort, a sign of safety. He’s my shelter in my storm, my near-literal shelter. If I tucked myself under him, yes—I’ve almost convinced myself—I might be able to survive all of this, weather whatever comes next on the horizon.

I take one of his hulklike palms and press it against my cheek. He stops chewing, surprised, assessing the situation, and wipes his free hand, unconsciously, on his jeans.

“Tell me something wonderful about us,” I say. I ask this of him every once in a while, use him to recount the past, and then I’ll roll it around in my brain and dish it back to Jamie, who sometimes aims the camera on me, sometimes just listens. Sometimes, I’ll add in tiny details upon regurgitation, slivers of information that come to me without warning, but most of the time I’m simply an echo of that which was fed to me. Though Rory has changed her mind thanks to the publicity bump for the gallery, my mom remains stalwartly against American Profiles, but she doesn’t get it—she doesn’t see that it’s cathartic for me to put this stuff down on record. If I don’t, what else might get lost or might evaporate with no warning at all, like it did the first time around? And she doesn’t know, of course, that Jamie is going to get me the answers that she refuses to. Besides, I stopped listening to my mom after I found the painting of the white house, the one we both remembered but the one that she pretended not to. His house for the other half of his life. Now, I’m living in the moment by ignoring her.

“What do you want to hear?” Peter says, keeping his palm in place. He seems nervous now, senses that this might lead somewhere different than the prior conversations have.

“Anything,” I say, then lean back against the velvet and gingerly swing my legs up into his lap. “Tell me anything wonderful about who we used to be.”

He hesitates, waiting to home in on the perfect answer to my loaded invitation.

“Two months after we started dating, we—on a whim—flew to Paris for the weekend,” he says, his face morphing into a smile. “I’d never been. You insisted on taking me, showing me the town.”

“Why haven’t you told me this before?” I ask, then close my eyes to see if I could recall any of it. The Eiffel Tower, the Seine, the sidewalk cafés with their fresh brie and their gluttonous, lingering lunches.

“To be honest, I just remembered. It was early on, and”—he shrugs—“I don’t know. You forget things.” I nod because you sure as hell do, and he continues.

“Anyway, I was nervous to fly there—there was a terrorism scare going on, so we splurged and went first class. Oh my god, we drank so much wine on the plane—and got these little toiletry sets that I think might still be stuffed in the bathroom cabinet—and by the time we got there, we were both hungover. But happy and on a high while hungover all the same—the good sort of drunk, you know? So we go there, and you insisted on blowing our budget by staying at the George V.”

“What’s the George V?”

“The nicest hotel in the city—like, super, super nice.”

“How’d we afford that?”

“Er, you have money. Your mom didn’t tell you this? I told her to tell you.”

I shake my head no. God knows what else my mom hasn’t told me.

“Well, yeah, you have a trust your dad set up for you before he, um, left. You never, ever touch it—the only exception was when you started the gallery. But for this trip, you said it was worth it. That you never do anything for yourself, and you wanted to go all out.” He shrugs. “You were so excited about it that I wasn’t going to stop you. If I’d been paying, we would have been at some fifty-buck-a-night fleabag, so…yeah.”

“So this place was decadent?” I try to picture it: maid service, six-hundred-thread-count sheets, late-night deliveries of chocolates and champagne. The new me very much approves.

“For some perspective, we were on the same floor as Hugh Grant.” He laughs, so I do, too. We’d watched Notting Hill last weekend, so I at least get the reference. “You kept trying to pretend that you weren’t stalking him, but you were totally stalking him, until we were in the same elevator with him, and you finally introduced yourself, and he was very polite and kind considering that we could see the hives that had broken out on your neck from nerves.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, though I’m smiling and I do kind of believe him.

“Don’t believe it all you want,” he says. “My hand is to God.”

“I don’t seem like the freak-out-upon-celebrity-sighting type.”

“You were a big Four Weddings and a Funeral fan.”

“I’ll have to watch it,” I say, distracted from the story for a moment, remembering just how little I indeed remember. “Okay, keep going.”

“So we spent all three days trekking from one museum to the next—the Louvre, the D’Orsay, the Orange Museum.”

“The Orange Museum?”

“That’s what I called it—I don’t speak French, so I did the best I could.” He laughs. “And you just couldn’t get enough of the city—the art, the architecture. And that’s when you told me that you used to paint but that you stopped when you were thirteen, and when I asked if you’d ever start again, and, you said, ‘Never.’ That it was really your dad’s thing anyway. And you seemed so vulnerable and regretful over it, that I didn’t say another word.” He stops now and blinks his lashes too quickly, and I can tell, because he’s been an emotional Ping-Pong ball since the second I woke up from my coma, that he’s teetering too close to the line again.

“Please don’t cry,” I say, hoping this is enough to stop him. “Please, just tell me more about Paris. It sounds like heaven.”

“Yes, okay.” I see him fighting against himself. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m such a fucking pansy these days.”

“It’s fine.” It’s not fine! This is not living in the moment!

“I just…oh god, this sounds so lame, but what the hell. It’s just that Paris was when I decided that I had to marry you, that you looked so goddamn sad over your confession, and well, your dad, and I just wanted to protect you from everything that had already happened. Even though I don’t think I even knew the bulk of what had happened, still, that’s what I wanted. We were standing in Notre Dame, staring up at the stained-glass windows, and I know it sounds cheesy, like one of those asinine commercials that I’d score, but I looked at you, and the light was bouncing every which way, and I just thought: This is it. She is it. I’m with her until the day I die.”

“Until you weren’t,” I say, and instantly regret it. Because now we are officially not living in the moment. Now we are dragging the whole mess of our shit into this moment with us.

“Until I wasn’t,” he concedes. “Like there are any other ways that I can say I’m sorry for that. If there were, I’d say them, too.”

“No, don’t. I’m sorry. I’m the one who shouldn’t have said that. I was out of bounds.”

I fall silent, and since there’s nothing more to say about that, and the Paris story has run out of steam, I lean over and kiss him. Not because it’s my first instinct but because maybe my doctors and therapists and—god help me—my mother, who e-mailed me three days ago to urge me to share my body again with my husband, are right: maybe it’s time to reconnect, and the only way to find out is to jump in feet first. So I jump; I leap before I look, run before I can walk, as Liv might say, though she’s already implored me not to.