The Blue Hour (2 page)

“So what you're saying is I am a disaster area.”

He was all smiles as he said this; a certain bad-boy cheerfulness as he acknowledged his imprudence, his need to mess up. I well knew this smile, as my father had been charming and witty, with no ability to get the bills paid. He was a so-called entrepreneur; a corporate guy who could never hold down a job, who always had a get-rich-quick scheme on the go, who made me and my mother move five times during my adolescence in his search for the next executive position, the next break scheme that was going to finally get us “on easy street” (an expression he used so often). But that reversal of fortune, that manna from heaven moment, never materialized. My mother found ongoing work as a geriatric nurse everywhere we went, as infirmity and ageing are two of life's great constants. She kept threatening to leave my father whenever he bumped into another setback, another financial loss that propelled us to yet another city, another rented house, a new school for me, a sense of ongoing uncertainty that was counterbalanced by the fact that my Dad loved me and I adored him. He was the sort of guy who, when he had money in his pocket, would indulge me and Mom relentlessly. God knows I preferred my father's absurd sunny outlook on life to my mother's bleaker perspective, even though I knew that hers had a certain credibility. When my father died of a sudden heart attack the first week I started college at the University of Minnesota, I was beyond crushed. Phoning me with the news my mother masked her distress with steely coolness.

“There was a will. You'll get his Rolex. The one thing he never hocked, along with his wedding ring. But don't cry for him. No one—not you, not me—could have saved your father from himself.”

But cry I did, long into that night and many thereafter. After my father's death, my mother and I began to detach from each other. Though she was the parent who got the bills paid and somehow kept the roof (or series of roofs) over our heads, I never felt much in the way of love from her. I still spent part of most major holidays with her and dutifully called her once a week. I remained the responsible daughter. And embraced, in my own way, her rigorous standards when it came to financial caution and saving for a rainy day. But when, just a few years ago, I got together with Paul—and finally brought him to meet her—my mother afterward was bluntness itself.

“So you're finally marrying your father.”

“That's not fair,” I said, my head reeling from the slap-across-the-face nature of her comment.

“The truth is never fair. If that makes you think that I am being, as usual, merciless, so be it. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't find Paul charming. He's charm itself. For a man eighteen years your senior he's not in bad shape, even if he dresses like Woodstock was last week. Still he does have a certain charm. And I know how lonely things have been for you since Donald walked out.”

Donald was my first husband—and it was I who ended our three-year marriage, as she well knew.

“I left Donald,” I heard myself telling my mother.

“Because he gave you no choice but to leave him. And it destroyed you. And now you are with a man much older and as irresponsible as your father and . . .”

“Paul isn't as irresponsible as you think.”

“Time will tell.”

Mom. She died a year ago; an out-of-nowhere stroke that killed her at the age of seventy-one.

Turbulence in the cabin. I peered out the window. The plane was trying to break cloud cover, rocking with its downward shift toward land. The man in the aisle seat shut his eyes tightly as the plane lurched in a treacherous manner.

“Do you think the pilot knows what he's doing?” Paul whispered to me.

“I'm sure he has a wife and children he'd like to see.”

“Or not.”

For the next five minutes the aircraft was like a prizefighter having a bad night, as it took ongoing body blows from the storm enveloping us. The children's cries hit new levels of discord. Several of the masked women began to keen. Our neighbor's eyes remained tightly shut, his lips now moving in what seemed to be silent prayer.

“Imagine if it was all to end right now,” Paul said. “What would you think?”

“If you're dead you're not thinking.”

“But say this was the moment before death hit. What would your last thought be?”

“Is this line of questioning supposed to distract me from the fact that the plane might crash?” I asked.

Paul laughed and was quickly silenced as the plane seemed to go into momentary free fall. I gripped the armrests so tightly my knuckles felt like they just might perforate the skin. I kept my eyes slammed shut until, out of nowhere, order and calm descended on the world. We had hit calm air. Moments later, we had the runway beneath us.

I opened my eyes. Paul's fingers remained gripped around the armrests, his face now the color of chalk. We reached for each other's hands. Then my husband spoke.

“I wonder: Is this all a mistake?”

CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION
at Casablanca. Controlled chaos. Hundreds of new arrivals being corralled into two different lines—one for Moroccans, another for the rest of humanity. Every historical epoch—from the Middle Ages to our current hyperconnected, cyberworld reality—seemed to be represented. There were sharply suited businessmen and -women everywhere—and at least half of those I saw, with their Italian tailoring and their black iPhones, were from North Africa. There were backpacker types, all grungy and twentysomething, eyeing the suits with zonked amusement. Just in front of me was a rail-thin man in a dusty brown suit—his teeth blackened by cigarettes—who must have come from Mauritania, as he was holding a travel document from that country in his right hand.

“What's the capital of Mauritania?” I asked Paul.

Without a pause for reflection he replied: “Nouakchott.”

“The things you know,” I said.

“This line is insane. When I came last time it was thirty-three years ago, when there were no computer checks, when the world wasn't as paranoid as it is now.”

“Zen, Zen, Zen,” I said, stroking my husband's face.

“This is Casablanca Airport, not some fucking Buddhist retreat.”

I laughed. But he stood there, bouncing from foot to foot, an ongoing fugue of impatience and anxiety.

“Let's go home,” he suddenly said.

“You don't mean that.”

“I do.”

I felt myself tense.

“How will we go home?” I asked.

“Get the next plane.”

“You're not serious.”

“I think I am. This is all wrong.”

“Because of the long line?”

“Because my instinct tells me: go home.”

“Even though your ‘instinct' told you to make us come here?”

“So you are angry at me.”

“If you want to go home, we'll go home.”

“You'd think me a loser if I did that,” he said.

“I never think you're a loser, my love.”

“But I know I am a liability.”

Liabilities. That was the word that ricocheted around my head when I discovered, nine weeks ago, the extent of his debts. Having promised me, eight months earlier, that he would curb his spending habits, a knock on our door came one Friday evening around six p.m. A gentleman from a collection agency was standing on our front porch, asking to speak with Paul Leuen. I explained that my husband was at the gym. “Ah, so you are Mrs. Leuen? Then you might be aware of the sixty-four hundred dollars that your husband owes to the Vintners Wine Society.” I was speechless. My mind was racing. When had he bought all that wine, and why hadn't I seen it anywhere in our house? The collection agent went on, explaining that the Wine Society had sent close to ten letters demanding “a conversation” about the unpaid sum that had accrued over two years. Now they had run out of patience. If the bill wasn't settled forthwith, legal action would follow, and could involve a lien on our home.

But instead of going inside and getting my checkbook and solving the problem on the spot (as I had done on several past occasions), I simply told the collection guy:

“You'll need to speak directly with my husband. He's at the Gold's Gym on Manor Street—which is about five minutes from here by car. Ask for him at the reception desk: they know him.”

Repeating the address of the gym again I excused myself and closed the door. As soon as I had ascertained that the collector had pulled off down the road in his car, I went into our bedroom, packed a small weekend bag, called my old college roommate, Ruth, at her home in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, and asked if I could use her foldout sofa for a few days. Then, after leaving Paul a note—
If the wine debt isn't somehow paid off by the time I am back late Tuesday night the marriage is over
—I got into my car and drove the eight hours south to the city I had always promised myself I would one day call my own. I deliberately kept my cell phone off all weekend. I never went online and spent the next four days trying not to bore Ruth with the cocktail of anger, guilt, and sadness that was coursing through me. Ruth—a professor of English at Brooklyn College, divorced, no kids, single, disappointed in love, wickedly funny, and hyper-cultural (“High art is God's apology for men,” she noted at one point between the three plays, two concerts, and two art exhibits we saw when I was there)—was, as always, a great friend. She steadied my resolve when I broached the idea that perhaps I should check in on Paul, see how he was bearing up.

“When he landed himself in debt nine months ago,” she asked, “what did you do?”

“I dug into my retirement fund and found the ten grand to get him out of trouble.”

“What did he promise you in return?”

“You know very well what he did. He admitted that he's got a sad pathological compulsion when it comes to spending, spending, spending . . . and he promised to curtail that destructive impulse.”

“An impulse that is corroding your marriage. It's all so sad.”

Ruth was aware of the fact that, when I met Paul three years earlier, I was thirty-seven and entering that last lap of possible fertility. Within six months of declaring love for each other, and talking about the wondrous possibilities of a shared future together, I delicately raised the fact that I did not want to pass through life without becoming a mother; that I was entering the now-or-never phase. I knew that I was bringing a certain degree of pressure to our relationship, and said that I would perfectly understand if Paul felt this was all too much too fast. His response astounded me.

“When you have met the love of your life, of course you want to have a child with her.”

Yes, Paul was a great romantic. Such a romantic that he proposed marriage shortly thereafter, even though I told him that, having been in that institution once before, I wasn't anxious about a return visit. But I was so swept up in the wonder of finding love at my age, and with such a talented and original man, and in Buffalo (!), that I said yes. He did say that, though he realized time was of the essence, we needed at least two years together before becoming parents. I agreed to his request, staying on the pill until eight months ago. At which point we seriously began to “try” (what a curious verb) for a baby. We went about the task very robustly—though sex was, from the outset, one of the aspects of our marriage that always worked. It wasn't as if we were having to motivate ourselves into making love every night of the week.

“You know, if I don't get pregnant naturally, there are other options,” I said six months later when nothing had yet happened.

“You'll get pregnant,” Paul said.

“You sound very certain about that.”

“It's going to happen.”

That conversation took place ten days before the debt collector arrived on our doorstep. As I headed south in my car toward Brooklyn, my cell phone off, my piercing sadness about Paul was underscored by the realization that he was my last chance at having a baby. And that thought . . .

Ruth splashed a little more wine into my glass. I took a long sip.

“He's not your last chance,” she said.

“I want a baby with Paul.”

“That's a definitive statement.”

Friendship is always a complex equation—especially a friendship where it had been agreed early on that we would never sugarcoat things; that we would speak what we felt to be the truth.

“I don't want to be a single mother,” I said. “If I can get him to just accept that he has certain obligations . . .”

“Paul had problems with money before you. Even though you've tried to organize his personal finances, he refuses to play smart. At the age of fifty-eight, he is not going to have some sort of epiphany and transform himself. He is what he is. Which therefore begs the question: Can you live with his ongoing recklessness?”

All the way home that question nagged at me. We project onto others that which we need and seek at a given moment. Life, they say, is a great teacher. But only if we are truly willing to shake off the illusions and misnomers within which we dwell.