“I’m not sure,” I said. “I genuinely don’t know if I can be married to you anymore.”
Eric exhaled like I’d socked him in the stomach. I had. It was unkind and harsh, and I shouldn’t have said it like that. But he was asking me an impossible question. He was asking about a future I could no longer fathom.
“That’s brutal,” he said.
Eric plopped a piece of pizza on a napkin. It was a ridiculous thing to do now. To eat. To begin eating.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
My apology pivoted him. “We can get through this together,” he said. “You know we can. We have been through everything together, Katy.”
I picked up a slice. It seemed like a foreign object. I wasn’t sure whether to eat it or take it outside and plant it.
The problem, of course, is that we hadn’t really been through everything together, because we hadn’t been through anything before. Not until now. Our life had unfolded with the ease of an open road. There were no forks, no bumps, just a long stretch into the sunset. We were, in many ways, the same people who had met at twenty-two years old. What was different was where we lived but not how. What had we even learned in the past eight years? What skills had we acquired to get us through this?
“This is too big,” I said.
“I’m just asking to be a part of it.” He looked at me with big, round brown eyes.
Before Eric and I got engaged, he asked my parents for permission. I wasn’t there, of course, but Eric reports that he went to their house one evening after work. My parents were in the kitchen, making dinner. Nothing would have been unusual about this. Eric and I dropped by my parents’—separately and together—often. On this particular evening he asked if he could talk to them in the living room.
We had just moved to the house in Culver City. I was twenty-five, and we’d been together for three years, two of them spent in New York, far away from my folks. We were home now, and ready to build a life together, beside them.
“I love your daughter,” Eric said once they were settled. “I think I can make her happy. And I love you both, too. I love being a part of your family. I want to ask Katy to marry me.”
My father was thrilled. He loved Eric. Eric had a way of fitting into our family that still allowed my father to be the boss. If you asked either of them, the structure didn’t need to change.
It was my mother who was quiet.
“Carol,” my father had said. “What do you think?”
My mother looked at Eric. “Are you two ready for this?”
In addition to her kindness and hospitality, my mother had a frankness that made her respected and a little bit feared. She could tell it like it was, and she did.
“I know I love her,” Eric said.
“Love is beautiful,” my mother told him. “And I know how true that is. But you’re both so young. Don’t you want to live a little more before you settle down? There’s so much to do and so much time to be married.”
“I want to live my life with her,” Eric had said. “I know we have a lot to experience, and I want us to experience it together.”
My mother had smiled. “Well,” she had said. “Then congratulations are in order.”
Looking at Eric across the table, the pizza between us, I thought that maybe her initial hesitation had been right. That we should have lived more. That we did not really understand the vows we’d taken. For better or for worse. Because now here we are, experiencing all that life has to deal out, and it has broken us. It’s broken me.
“I’m going to go to Italy,” I said to him. “I’m going to go on that trip. And I think while I’m gone we should take some space.”
“Well, you’ll be in Italy,” he said. “So space seems inevitable.” He tried for a smile.
“No, like a break,” I said.
I knew in that moment we were both thinking about the Friends episode, the ridiculous, impossible idea that a break was somehow a hovering, and not a speeding car out of town. It almost made me laugh. What would it take to take his hand, turn on the TV, and snuggle down together? To pretend that what was happening wasn’t.
“Are you thinking about a separation?”
I felt cold. I felt it down into my bones. “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know what to call it, Eric.”
He turned stoic. It was a look I’d never seen from him before. “If that’s what you want,” he said.
“I don’t know what I want right now except to not be here. You, of course, are free to make your own choices, too.”