No, I recognized Alice’s complexity from the beginning. What I didn’t grasp was that Alice is a growing, evolving organism. So am I. I want to believe that we are not like the green turtles of Ascension Island, that we have evolved beyond the basic patterns of the natural world. I want to believe that it isn’t possible for Alice to go back to being the person she was before I met her. I want to tell Eric that he’s wrong about my wife. The trip through law school, through her career, into the depths of our marriage, hasn’t just been a side trip from which she can emerge and step back onto the intended path of her life. Our marriage is not a misguided adventure, as much as Eric Wilson would like it to be.
And it occurs to me that this is the very essence of what I love about Alice. She contains contradictions, she contains multitudes. She embraces every stage of her life, learning from each one, carrying her experiences with her, nothing left behind. Intuitively adapting, becoming a different, more complex version of herself with every passing year.
I expected marriage to be a door that we went through. Like a new house, you step into it, expecting it to be an unchanging space to inhabit. But, of course, I was wrong. Marriage is a living, changing thing that you must tend to both alone and together. It grows in all sorts of ways, both ordinary and unexpected. Like the tree outside our front window, or the kudzu that lined the backyard of Alice’s father’s house the night we got engaged, it is a living thing of contradictions—simultaneously predictable and baffling, good and bad—growing more complicated each day.
Then Alice turns to face Eric, as if she is singing directly to him. They sing the duet, and the whole place grows hushed, mesmerized by them together up there onstage. They’re face-to-face, knees touching. Her eyes are closed. Doubt seeps in. The worry that used to exist only at the edge of my consciousness, held at bay by my optimism and the blindness of my love, is now a black fog in my brain.
Is that why she wanted me here tonight—so I can see what has happened between her and Eric? Is this her way of telling me that our marriage has run its course? I try to steady myself for the moment I may have to walk out of the club alone.
81
One of the questions I ask couples in therapy is “Do you still believe that you have the capacity to surprise each other?”
The answer, too often, is no.
I wish I could come up with an easy formula for inserting surprise back into a marriage. That simple change could be the salvation for so many marriages I’ve seen. The Marriage Defibrillator, I’d call it. A good, stiff shock to revive the system.
Seeing Alice in the black minidress and Doc Martens is a surprise. But what happens onstage isn’t. Watching her sing with Eric, I think I can see the end of our story.
As it turns out, I’m wrong. When the night is over and almost everyone has left, I’m standing outside again—worn out, troubled, confused by what I’ve witnessed—when she steps out of the club.
Her mascara is messed up, and I can’t tell if it’s from the heat of the bar or she’s been crying. But here she is, holding on to me tightly. “Too much whiskey,” she says, her words fuzzy and slow. “I’m gonna need to lean on you.”
On the drive home, Alice surprises me again. She flips down the passenger-side visor, peers into the mirror, grimaces. “Should have worn waterproof mascara. Some of us got to talking about him right at the end. We were telling stories about our last tour. I laughed so hard I cried.”
When we reach Fulton Avenue, the long stretch of empty road descending toward the beach, she powers down her window. Waves of fog glow under the streetlights. “Mmm,” she says, sticking her head out the window. “Smells like the ocean.”
And I am struck by a memory of a night just like this one, years ago, when we were newly in love. A cruel kind of déjà vu. Things were simple then. Our path forward seemed clear.
After a moment, I ask, “Ever heard of the green turtles of Ascension Island?”
“That’s random,” she says, snapping the mirror shut. She doesn’t look at me.
It’s after three in the morning when we retreat into our bedroom. The curtains are open and I can see the moon rising over the Pacific Ocean. Alice is sloppy drunk, but we have sex anyway, because she wants to and I want to. I want to reclaim what is mine, what is ours.
I lie awake, Alice sleeping noisily beside me. There’s hope for us yet. Or is there? I think of turtles swimming endlessly south across the Atlantic Ocean. More important, though, I think of The Pact, this hole we have fallen into, my mind in the background frantically still calculating, trying to figure a way out.
At 9:12 A.M., I notice that I’ve slept straight through the alarm. It’s a gentle alarm—David Lowery of Cracker singing “Where Have Those Days Gone.” The clock lies sideways on the floor beside the bed. Alice is asleep beside me, a little drool and tangled hair the only evidence of her wild night.
I realize that I’ve woken up because of banging next door. The walls seem to be shaking, and at first I think it’s the neighbors. Our neighbors are a friendly elderly couple, and I’ve always liked them, but they have been known to host all-day mah-jongg games.
Then it dawns on me that the noise is coming from our front door.
“Alice,” I whisper. “Alice?”
Nothing.
I shake her shoulders. “There’s someone at the door!”
She flips over, pushing hair out of her eyes. She blinks against the light. “What?”
“There’s someone at the door.”
“Ignore it,” she groans.
“They’re not going away.”
Abruptly, she’s fully awake, sitting up. “Fuck.”
“What should we do?”
“Fuck fuck fuck.”
“Get dressed,” I say. “Quick. We have to get out of here.”
Alice jumps out of bed, pulls on her dress and boots from last night, and throws on her trench coat. I tug on my dirty jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers.
More banging. “Alice! Jake!” The doorknob rattles. I recognize the voice. Declan.
We race out the back door and down the stairs into the yard. It’s freezing. The neighborhood is blanketed in fog, a chill breeze drifting in from the ocean. I help Alice over the back fence and into the next yard, and I hastily follow. We move quickly through the grid of rectangular yards, over tottering wooden fences. At one point, we have to climb a bottlebrush tree to get over a high fence. Finally, at the corner of Cabrillo and Thirty-ninth, we slip through a gate and out onto the sidewalk.
In the distance, I can still hear Declan shouting our names. His partner must be in the SUV by now, trolling the Avenues, looking for us.
I pull Alice behind a bank of recycling cans. I check my pockets: $173, phone, house keys, wallet, credit cards. Alice is shivering, pulling her coat tight around her body. She looks at me, panic in her eyes. Leaves are stuck to her coat, sticky red petals from the bottlebrush tree.
“Which way do we go?” she asks, petrified. I don’t have a clue.
82