Marta looked at Dean and then up at the sky. The two of them stood there watching the plane, Dean with his hands in his pockets, Marta with hers over her mouth in disbelief. The plane whirred, sputtered, returned to whirring, circled and rose, like a plant growing toward the sun. Marta imagined the stones inside it. Her small one and Dean’s large one, sprouting, unfurling, intertwining until the plane nearly burst open. She saw wheel-sized blossoms opening up wide and humid against the windows, like lovers’ palms pressed. Marta closed her eyes and listened. The plane’s whir grew faint and then it returned, it grew fainter still and then returned a second time. She couldn’t tell if it was retreating or coming home. She couldn’t say if the plane would circle back and land at their feet or disappear before they’d even had a chance to eat breakfast.
Dean held out his hand to Marta. “Ready to go back?” he said.
Marta opened her eyes and searched the sky for the plane’s tiny X. She didn’t answer Dean. She didn’t take his hand. She just stood and waited, straining her eyes and ears, until she hurt all over with love.
THREE COUCHES
SPENCER WAS LEAVING his wife, Cassandra, and their two children, Melody and Levi. Melody was twelve, chocolate-haired, and accomplished on the violin. Her favorite color was mauve, and she found eggs, scrambled or otherwise, revolting. Spencer felt confident that Melody was the sort of girl who’d be prudent and prudish, at least until she was legal. Levi was blond and seven, toothy and not too sharp, bewitched by trucks and trains, transportation in general, as well as ice cream, which he could never manage, whether it came in a cup or cone. Cassandra, well. She was busy. Eternally occupied, rushing, thinking, scratching out and scratching through ballpoint lists, staring off into a place in space that was composed of dental appointments and vaccinations and reupholstery. But still, in the ways that seemed to matter to everyone else, Cassandra was near perfect. He knew it. She knew it. But none of that mattered. Spencer was leaving them, all three of them, with the two-story brick in the good school district so he could move into a one-bedroom apartment in the bad one.
What difference did it make where he lived? It wasn’t like he was going to school. He didn’t need a science lab that promised no less than one microscope per two students. He wasn’t going to get remarried and have more kids who deserved a cap on class size or a cafeteria that composted or a jazz band elective. A one-bedroom that backed up to the reservoir, to a sagging fence woven with windblown grocery sacks, was all Spencer required. That and a leather couch and a mattress on cinder blocks and a premiere cable package and a couple of bars of Zest.
Spencer had no use for a plaster birdbath or matching nightstands with brass claw-and-ball feet or a toile camelback sofa like the one he’d been living with for fifteen years. It wasn’t like he’d miss the salmon bath towels that advertised CFW (her initials, not his) or the tissue box made of mother-of-pearl that held little more than something he was going to snot on. And he could certainly do without the carp-shaped windsock and the perky pineapple flag and Cassandra’s “Melody has a tap recital and Levi has a soccer banquet and don’t forget that next weekend we promised to go see so-and-so who just gave birth to such-and-such.” Spencer was just fine making that whole song and dance go away. The sheer madness of self-made madness had just become more than he could bear. So, Spencer had made up his mind to leave. All he wanted now was to run the numbers all day and come home at 6:45 to an empty apartment that smelled of old, sculpted shag. He wanted to walk in the door with his Mexican carryout and sit on the couch and watch Bonanza Gold Diggers and eat queso and chips and drink warm, dark, Irish beer.
This was an image he played in his mind, on loop, as if it were pornography. He knew he was imagining the classic divorced man, the deadbeat dad. He knew it should bring him some sort of guilt or grief or horror, but all it brought him was relief. When he saw himself on the couch, getting fat, the cheese down the front of his button-down, the dingy walls where someone else’s picture hooks still hung, the television on while he slept in his work clothes, beer tipping invisible into the deep shag, it was like a little window into Eden. He could hear the angels sing.
Of course, everyone wanted to know why Spencer was leaving. Was there someone else? Was he going broke? Had he lost his job months back? Had he been pretending to go to work all this time while he was really going to a bar all day to drink? Was it pain pills? Was he secretly dying? Was he finally coming out of the closet? The answer was always the same: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
“Men,” his boss informed him, “never leave unless they have a plan. And by plan I mean woman.” But Spencer didn’t have a woman. His lover was emptiness. He had nothing outside of his marriage. He had nothing inside of himself. It was as if he’d been erased, hosed down. He knew he loved Cassandra and Melody and Levi, but he couldn’t feel it. He knew nothing other than that feeling nothing was wrong. Spencer didn’t know how to explain why he was leaving until one day, in counseling, with Cassandra sitting beside him dabbing at her swollen eyes, it came to him. “It’s just,” he said, then paused, momentarily exhilarated that it had finally dawned on him. “It’s just that life isn’t what I thought it would be.”
There was a brief moment of silence during which Spencer heard a woman laugh, far off, outside in the parking lot. Then Cassandra lurched from the couch, as if someone had stabbed her in the back. She nearly turned over the coffee table that held the Kleenex, the dish of Wint O Green mints, the grimy communal stress ball.
“Well,” she said, trembling. “I’ve officially heard it all.” Then she grabbed her purse and her coat and stormed out of the office in a puff of cold air that felt like a flash of death but dissipated soon enough. The therapist waited until she was gone, then he blew air out of his nose in a bullish way.
“Spencer,” Dr. Darvin said. “Tell me some things that have turned out the way you expected.”
Queso from Durango’s, Spencer thought. Bonanza Gold Diggers. But Spencer did not say those things aloud.
“Life has a lot of moving parts,” the doctor said. “But if we start from love instead of obligation, those parts can be a lot easier to manage.”
That made Spencer think of the year he’d played baseball. He’d been ten. He liked the coach. He liked the teammates. He even liked the uniform, the feel of the ball tossed up and down in his glove, the sound of the bat when it made a good connection. But everything put together had seemed a joke. All the parts, when forced to interact, seemed absurd. What was the point, this running from here to there? This line and that line? It was a fabrication. A farce. An orchestrated circus that caused grown men to turn crimson, women to scream nose-to-nose with other women, children to doubt their self-worth. And, one particular May Saturday, after a missed triple, it even caused one man, an opposing coach with a handlebar mustache, to drop to his knees and clutch his heart. At first it seemed a show, a dramatic reaction. Some of Spencer’s teammates even pointed and jeered. But when the man keeled over on his forehead in the orange dirt and proceeded to foam at the mouth, it became clear something dire had come to pass. All in the name of something made-up and make-believe.
An ambulance eventually came to cart the coach off, but by the time it arrived, bouncing over the grass, he was purple. Spencer watched the EMTs bend over him, their green latex gloves perched on their hips like exotic birds. He watched them lift the man’s limp body onto a stretcher. He watched the ambulance retreat. People stood in the warm sun and murmured. Spencer squinted into the sky until he felt nothing. Then he took off his glove and took off his hat and went to retrieve his bat, until his coach grabbed his elbow and frowned. “The game goes on, Spencer,” he said. “It always goes on.” And it did. With the same, if not intensified, passion as before.