Chinatown

It is the ordinary that I miss, the unremarkable minutes.  Close to the end, not knowing it was close to the end, riding home from the Mexican restaurant where we ate tortilla soup and scooped up gobs of perfect guacamole on tortilla chips and Googled Faye Dunaway to see if she were still alive—we’d just seen “Chinatown” at the Triplex — we stopped at the Price Chopper for something, what was it?

 “I can go,” I said, meaning, you can wait here in the car in the parking lot for me to do whatever small errand it was:  distilled water?  Toilet paper?  And him saying: No, I’ll come with you, because that’s what he did, he came with me, because he just liked to; he liked to be with me, in proximity, doing some ordinary and forgettable thing.

Back in the car, driving home through Stockbridge on the dark empty road, I thought about how  different the silence between us felt, than it had felt in my first, unhappy marriage, driving with that husband through the silent suburbs of New Jersey, when it wasn’t just the road that was dark and empty.  I felt anguished,  then, stranded alone in the wrong life, without faith that happiness was even possible, the silence in that car a deep space, vast and indifferent.  Now, this silence was home. This man, this car, this night out together, this mundane errand at Price Chopper: home.  How good it was, this home we had made, that we lived in wherever we went; this place where silence was sweet and full of love.

I almost stopped writing to look up the date, when that was exactly, that we went to that movie, and drove home in the dark, and I remembered that long ago loneliness and noted that it was gone; that I was at home in my right life, now, with this man who wanted to accompany me to the paper products aisle just to be together. I wanted to write that exact number down for dramatic effect.  As if it’s not dramatic enough to say:  it was a matter of days, when this happened; only a few days, before he died.