CHAPTER 2

Classifieds

Classifieds

DEE

I don’t sleep.

Lou does, of course — she has the gift, the way she has most gifts, and she is snoring the small dignified snore she would deny to her grave. I lie in the dark of our cabin with the ship breathing underneath me, that long slow motion of a thing too big to feel the water, and I let the name I said out loud tonight sit in the room with me. There was someone else. Five years I kept it swallowed, and I set it on a cocktail table between two glasses of mediocre wine, and now I cannot get it back.

But it isn’t Gary I think about, lying there. It’s John.

That is the trick nobody warns you about. You spend years believing grief is a single closed room you visit, a place with his name on the door, and then one night a stranger in a red dress dances alone and the whole house opens at once and every room is his. I say a different man’s name to Lou, and it is my husband who comes.

So I let him come.

I met John over the classified ads.

People always want the story to be more romantic than that, and I refuse to give it to them, because the truth is better. It was 1988 and I was a sportswriter — one of the only women on the sports desk in that whole building, which meant I covered high school volleyball and wrestling and got told I was pretty by men in press boxes for about a decade — and I had also, through the particular logic of small newspapers, been handed the classified ad section to manage, because someone decided a woman could do two jobs for the price of most of one. So half my week was box scores and half was widows selling davenports and farmers selling calves, and I loved both halves more than I have ever admitted to a serious person.

John worked upstairs. He wrote editorials and had opinions about the Middle East and a divorce as fresh and ugly as mine, and he came down to classifieds one afternoon to place an ad — I don’t even remember for what, a car I think, some car he was selling in the wreckage of splitting a household — and he leaned on my counter and read me the ad he’d written, and it was four times too long and beautiful and completely useless as a classified ad, because he’d written it like an editorial, and I told him so.

“You’re paying by the word,” I said. “This is a car, not a farewell address.”

“Everything’s a farewell address if you write it right,” he said, and I should have known then. That was the whole man in one sentence, standing at my counter. I cut his ad down to nine words and he watched me do it like I was performing surgery, and then he asked me to lunch, and I said no, because I had three children and a divorce and a sports desk and precisely no room in my life for a man who thought a car ad was a place to be profound.

He asked again the next week. And the week after. He was not deterred by no; he treated it as a rough draft. We had both been through the kind of divorce that leaves you suspicious of your own judgment — his to a woman I would later be grateful to, mine to a man I had married at twenty-two because he was correct about most things, and I had not yet learned that being correct and being kind are different countries. So we were careful, in the way of people who have been wrong before and know the cost of it.

And then we were not careful at all.

We moved fast. Everyone told us to slow down — my sister, his brother, the little voice I had installed in myself after the first marriage that specialized in slowing me down — and we did not listen to any of them, because when you have both already spent years being unhappy with the wrong person, you develop a very fine instinct for the right one, and you stop being willing to waste time you now understand is finite. Six months after that first lunch he didn’t get, we were married.

On a ship.

I have to laugh, lying here on this one. Of course it was a ship. We married on a cruise with exactly two guests — his brother, and a friend of ours who cried through the whole thing and swore she wasn’t — because we wanted the wedding to be the honeymoon and the honeymoon to be the beginning of the traveling we had already promised each other we would do. Neither of us had money. We had children and alimony and my sports-desk salary and his editorial one, and we spent what we didn’t have on a cruise wedding because John said, and I agreed, that you cannot take it with you and you certainly cannot take it with you if you never went anywhere.

I wore a long pink dress. White lace at the top, a pleated skirt that moved when I did. I have it still, in a box, in a closet in Kansas City; I could not tell you the last time I opened the box and I could tell you the exact weight of the fabric in my hands.

And we danced to “A Whole New World.”

I know. I know. A cartoon song, the one from Aladdin, the flying-carpet song — the friend who cried picked it, actually, as a joke that stopped being a joke the moment the music started, because the words are: let me show you the world. And that was the entire marriage in one sentence before it had even begun. That was the promise. Not to have a world — we didn’t have one, we had debt and other people’s children and two divorces between us — but to show each other one. To go and look. Twenty-five cruises. Every continent but Antarctica, and he had that one penciled in for our thirtieth anniversary.

There is one more thing about John I have to explain, because it is the thing that made all the rest of it possible and the thing I understood least at the time.

When I met him, he was ten years sober.

He told me on the second date, flatly, the way he told me most true things: I’m an alcoholic. Ten years dry. It’s the most important thing about me and I hope one day it’s the least interesting. I did not fully understand, then, what it had cost him — ten years of building a life one refused drink at a time, of walking into rooms and finding the exits, of being at his own wedding, later, on a ship that was essentially a floating bar, and never once. I understood it better as the years went on and I sat beside him in the folding-chair rooms he went to in every port city we ever docked in, church basements and rec centers, listening to strangers save each other’s lives with coffee and honesty. I went with him not because I had to. I went because it was the truest hour of his week and I did not want to be excluded from it.

When we married, I stopped drinking too.

Nobody asked me to. John would have been horrified to think he’d asked me to; he was fierce about that, that his sobriety was his and no one owed him theirs. I did it anyway, quietly, the way you’d match your steps to someone you’re walking beside without discussing it. It seemed to me a small thing to give up — I was never much of a drinker — in exchange for standing fully inside the most important thing about the man I loved instead of at the edge of it. Solidarity, I suppose, though that word is too political for what it was. It was just: whatever this is, I’m in it with you. All the way in.

Twenty-five years.

The ship breathes. Lou’s snore hitches and resettles. Somewhere two decks below, a band I have refused all night to go hear is playing the last song, and I lie in the dark of a cabin on a cruise I did not want to take, and I let myself be twenty-nine again, in a pink dress with a pleated skirt, being shown a whole new world by a man who read car ads like farewell addresses and turned out, in the end, to be right about that too.