I teared up all through dinner, with Brian occasionally patting my hand. I kept crying because I loved him and his appetites and all the sensuality and good humor and heat-seeking that went with them.
Sorry I Missed Your Call For a little while, in 2007, Brian and I were bicoastal. I worked in L.A. on a short-lived TV show. He flew in from Hartford, right after work, every two weeks, took a quick nap in my office on Friday night, and woke up to have dinner with me and whoever was still around. He read multiple drafts of each week’s show and watched the scenes when he could. He’d find a corner to sit in and take note of everything—costume, makeup, rehearsal, petty disagreements. He loved each surreal and complex part of shooting a show. One weekend, Brian woke up early and came back with an inflatable raft. He asked me to make sandwiches and drove us to the set in Burbank. He chatted up the security guard, who waved us in. We spent most of the day in and around a real pool, ate a real lunch, and lounged in the sun in our beautiful fake world. When we left, Brian handed the security guard the bottle of white wine he’d chilled for him in the pool.
Two years ago, I gave Brian a new script of mine to read, and my husband, my cheerleader, TV-lover, inveterate script-reader, the man who half-hoped we’d wind up in Silver Lake and not Stony Creek, Connecticut, didn’t read it. In the years we were together, Brian read everything I’d ever written, within days of my finishing. After a week, I asked about the TV script. Brian said that he hadn’t gotten around to it. He sounded a little puzzled. Weeks went by and he didn’t mention it. I steeled myself and asked him about it again and he said, with no chagrin and not much interest, that the format was too difficult to follow. He left it lying on the bedroom floor, until I took it back to my office.
Sunday, January 26, 2020, Zurich
At the JFK Palm, we ate and tipped well and then found our way to the Swissair lounge, which had been moved temporarily to the very distant lounge of Emirates Airline, where the female staff at the front desk combined brisk efficiency with an unmistakable nod to deference （an actual repeated head-duck） in their dealings with Brian. I got a bland sideways smile. I handled the tickets and I handled the passports and still, the longer we stood there, the more what-else-can-I do-for-you-Mr.-Ameche there was. Nothing comparable came my way. Brian did not mind. Even I didn’t mind. Patriarchy, and my handsome husband, whaddayagonnado?
The lounge was clean and there was a lot of fruit and all sorts of buffet dishes—proper Middle Eastern, Italian-ish, French-ish—and a bustling bar. Brian snagged a big ball of falafel as we got settled. It wasn’t stealing, of course, but I didn’t think it was polite to reach out with your big fingers into the pile, when there were silver tongs, tiny forks, small plates, and matching small three-ply paper cocktail napkins waiting. Brian didn’t care if it was rude, and the not caring wasn’t a function of Alzheimer’s. He had never cared.
We each have things we do that the other person finds faintly shocking. At home, I go outside to get the newspaper in what I call my pajamas—a ratty T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts from college, rather than some fetching pink-piped set. We have neighbors. People can and do see me. I don’t care. Brian was always, truly, appalled. He thought it was low-rent and, although he would never use the word, slatternly. （After the neurologist’s appointment, he said, Why confuse people? Why make them think there are two people with Alzheimer’s in the house? And we did both laugh and I still dash out of the house on Sunday mornings.） We are, my daughter the psychologist tells me, people with traces of mild sociopathy. I don’t disagree.
Brian scouted the lounge for a satisfactory pair of armchairs and dove into the New York and London Timeses. I don’t know what reading the papers means to him anymore: politics, a bit of sports news （a football player at Yale in his day, he refuses to watch college football now, upset at the lack of care for the players, but he still keeps track of which teams are doing what）。 Some tidbits about real estate or architecture or design used to catch his eye, from his forty years as an architect. He never comments anymore. He used to read me several paragraphs at a clip about things that struck him, and even more, he loved for me to read articles to him while he drove. I never read aloud to him enough to suit him, but I once did almost the entire Sunday Review while we pursued an unlikely five-star BBQ place on the other side of Connecticut. When I faltered on the last Op-Ed piece, he said, “Finish strong, darling.”
Brian folded up the newspapers to bring on the plane and then thought better of it. There was a whole style of planning, of near-hoarding of favorite things, of anticipating his own needs, which has been his way since we met. He never got into his car, from April to November, without making sure he had at least one of his lesser fishing rods and some flies in the trunk. He never left a restaurant without fistfuls of mints, to put in his nightstand, candy jar, and glove compartment. On this trip, he’s done. I give him a wad of Swiss francs. He knows where his medications are, plus his little vial of Viagra. If he doesn’t have it, he doesn’t need it. If I’m not carrying it, it’s not important.
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We take every little Swissair giveaway, for no reason, and we hang on to our carry-on bags. I have insisted that we don’t bring proper suitcases, because I will not lug home a large suitcase full of clothes he will never wear and medicines he will never take—while packing, Brian shook a bottle of ten Viagra at me like a maraca and said, This is worth something.
I won’t dump his clothes at the Swiss version of Goodwill and leave his meds for the cleaning staff. Basically, I just won’t deal with it, with “after.” After Brian has died and I have to leave him, my goal is to get myself on a plane with my friend who has offered to accompany me home. Then my daughter Sarah will meet me at the airport and Sarah and I will be met by my daughter Caitlin and the two of them will say good night to me and my fantasy is that I will fall into my bed and not get up for two weeks. This is absolutely not what happens. We have brought our crappiest carry-on bags, black briefcases that double as overnight bags from Brian’s business-travel days. Brian and I both hate the thought of throwing away a nice suitcase. Sociopaths, maybe, and given to splurging, yes, but not people who can throw out a barely used, unscratched, two-hundred-fifty-dollar suitcase.
The Book Brothers
When we moved to a small Connecticut village in 2014, Brian was invited to join a men’s book club. He was dubious because they seemed to prefer nonfiction and he did not, but he was pleased to be asked and he went regularly. He suggested a novel whenever it was his turn to suggest. They asked him why he wanted to be in their book club and he said, I love a good read and I love intimacy. He was pleased that they looked shocked, and he felt that he’d announced himself properly. Once in a while, he has coffee on a weekend with one of the guys. He says the books are usually too simple （“I don’t know. It’s about some horse who overcomes obstacles”） or sentimental （“Olympic team of rowers. They win”） for him, but he enjoyed the group and the chatting before and after until two years ago, when almost everything about the book club began to irritate him.