I hear him grumbling when the emails come in: There are too many schedule changes; he doesn’t know which house the meeting’s at and they expect him to know by now which man lives where, so they don’t always attach the address of the meeting. He goes to a meeting on the wrong night but he doesn’t mind, because a few months earlier, a “book brother” showed up at our house a week early. Brian tells me that one of the men he really likes, with whom he’d had lunch a couple of years ago, is moving out of town. I encourage Brian to call him for a last lunch, but he says that it’s too late, that the man has already moved away. One day, I look at Brian’s phone （I often find myself looking at Brian’s phone these last two years, but I pretend I don’t） and I see an email from the man who I thought moved away, putting in his pitch for the book he’d like the group to read. He has moved about ten minutes farther away and is still very much in the book club.
This fall, Brian has gotten the book for his book club （meaning, I picked it up from our library, across the street） and talks to me about it with enthusiasm. But I can see that not only does the bookmark not advance, it goes backward, every couple of days, to the first ten pages. He doesn’t go to the meeting and the book sits on his nightstand for months, even as we are packing for Zurich, because even when he sees it, it doesn’t matter, or he has forgotten about it, and because I cannot bear to touch or even mention it.
Monday, January 27, 2020, Zurich
We land in Zurich and the hotel’s car service takes us to the pretty hotel in the cobblestoned Old Town section. The city’s warmer than we expect, and it’s drizzling. The Widder is a bunch of old buildings pulled together into a posh hotel through oddly placed lifts and corridors, the kind of hotel we might choose for a holiday, although it has never occurred to either of us, ever, to go to Zurich. Every restaurant we pass is filled with couples, most of whom are apparently pairs of straight white men in business-ish clothes. Sometimes, they are foursomes. Occasionally, there is a businessman in his late sixties and a hot young thing in a silk minidress and strappy sandals （My God, I think, the cobblestones）。 Between Brian’s trouble with proprioception this past year—gashed his hand, slipped off the front porch, tumbled backward off a picnic bench—and my new-for-Zurich terror that he will slip and fall on the wet cobblestones of Old Town and we will not be able to get ourselves to Dignitas, the cobblestones—and conversations about cobblestones—loom very large on this trip.
I feel shifty and out of place at the hotel’s front desk. Brian wanders around, in and out of the lobby, and when I see him walk through a pair of swinging doors at the end of the hall while I am searching for our passports, my stomach hurts, as it does every time he leaves my sight. When he comes back a few minutes later, I’ve pulled myself together. Every time the concierge asks me a question, I fumble like a suspect. Why are we here? Would we like a map of all the stores on Bahnhofstrasse （Gucci, Fendi, Hublot, Cartier）？ May they show me the bar and the library? I want to say to Brian that it reminds me a little of a hotel we loved in Amsterdam, but I am afraid that he won’t remember the trip, the hotel. I am afraid that he won’t but he will pretend that he does and I won’t know if he does or he doesn’t, which is awful, or I will know he doesn’t, which is also awful, and I don’t say anything, which is usually the choice I make now. We are both exhausted by the time we get to our room.
The room is hotel-pleasant and pretty, with floor-to-ceiling French windows, looking down on a bakery, a jewelry store. （Brian encourages me to go in and the stuff is lovely and he picks out a ring he thinks I’ll like and I do like it and we’re both pleased. He has gotten me some really ugly jewelry in the last three years, things that are so far from my taste that, if he were a different man, I’d think he was keeping a Seventies-boho, broke-ass mistress in Westville and gave me by mistake the enameled copper earrings and bangle he bought for her. The Zurich rings are beautiful, beaten gold and custom-made with small blue opals, like bits of night, and ten thousand dollars apiece. Brian and I smile politely and walk out. He says, I wanted you to have something…and I know he means to remember him by, and this is the last time we cry together, before Thursday.）
It’s raining but couples are strolling into bars and the big, old-fashioned tea shop on the corner. We might have come for a holiday. I guess.
Back in our room, we stand in front of the big window for a few minutes, and I taste it again, the metallic tang of almost normal. If it was truly normal, we’d unpack and shower. That is, Brian would unpack. I would dick around and then shower and hope that he might unpack for me, which rarely happens. Then we’d get into bed and nap or make love （there’s always a lot of Viagra to use up; the man stocked up on Viagra the way my mother hoarded canned goods—just in case） or we’d bundle ourselves out the door to the Moroccan restaurant in Paris where the chef would come rushing to greet us when he heard Brian’s voice. （On our first visit and Brian’s big order, he came out and looked at our table in surprise: Only the two of you? He laughed and then he brought Brian two more small tagines, because Brian hadn’t yet tried the lamb or the pigeon.） The punkish headshop/barbershop in London where we’d always go right after landing, suitcase in hand, where Brian got the best haircut of his life in a shop so small, we were both high by the time we left it. This time, we stare out the window and we both sigh. We undress and crawl into bed. Brian sleeps for a couple of hours.
I worry, sometimes, that a better wife, certainly a different wife, would have said no, would have insisted on keeping her husband in this world until his body gave out. It seems to me that I’m doing the right thing, in supporting Brian in his decision, but it would feel better and easier if he could make all the arrangements himself and I could just be a dutiful duckling, following in his wake. Of course, if he could make all the arrangements himself, he wouldn’t have Alzheimer’s—and if he had wanted to make all the arrangements on his own, he wouldn’t have been Brian. I walk this loop in my mind as I wake up and unpack.
I think of Susie Chang, my eminently sensible Tarot card reader （and if you think that it’s absurd to find comfort in Tarot, I’ve got no argument for you）， who uses the Crow deck to take a look at what might happen, or what I might wish to mitigate. My daughters appear, repeatedly, as two crows, or two lions, or two shields in front of me, and, again, if you think that this is the height of idiocy, I don’t disagree. Turning over the Chariot card, in a last reading before Brian and I travel, Susie and I see a small crab in the corner. “This is your card,” Susie Chang says. “You have to drive this chariot, you have to drive it with a hard shell, because otherwise it will crush you beneath the wheel.” She says, “You cannot let go until it is over.” I make an I-know-I-know noise. She taps the card and says, If you let go of the reins, it will crush you, and I burst into tears. Most of the time, I do feel like the little crab, armored and fragile.
* * *
—
I have brought nothing to Zurich but washed-out black and gray clothes and my everyday underwear. I will not be—as my mother would have said about other things—making an effort. I try to figure out which “fun” things we’ll do in Zurich. At home, we’d had a pretty good time making a list of a dozen things, including the best restaurants of Zurich. In the end we do get to the Chagall windows, a couple of walks down Bahnhofstrasse, Lake Zurich （There is Tina Turner’s house, the guide says, and we wave. It seems to me that she has had a lovely, loving marriage to this Swiss guy, and I’m glad for her）， and a not-bad Italian place around the corner. The whole trip, I can wear only yoga pants and one moth-eaten cardigan. Now that we’re here, struggling to pull ourselves together to go down for dinner, I think that if we can show up for breakfast, smile at the concierge, take the tour of Lake Zurich that we’ve already booked, and visit those famous Chagall stained-glass windows, since one of Brian’s hobbies is making stained glass, we will have done a great job—and filled the time from Monday to Thursday morning.