Golden State: A Novel (7 page)

Last night, I arrived at KMOO just past midnight, as I had done so many times in the past. Entering the building I felt a rush of warm nostalgia, along with a sense of regret—the feeling you get when you leave a city you’ve grown tired of, only to realize there were so many things you wanted to do but never got around to. I brought Marnee Thai in take-out boxes, Mitchell’s ice cream for dessert. I tried to make the night last as long as possible. I ate slowly and talked slowly. Neither of us looked at the divorce papers on the table, which Tom only needed to sign. Odd, how easy it is to end a thing that took so long to create.

It was just past two in the morning when I told Tom I was going home. “You can barely keep your eyes open,” he scolded. “Spend the night here.”

He led me to the old leather couch in the staff lounge and put a blanket over me. The couch smells permanently of cigarettes and Kool-Aid. It is a historic couch. The list of musicians who have crashed there, overdosed there, and fucked there is legendary. There’s the story about Grace Slick and a young male intern that is retold every time they hire a new employee. There’s the story about Skip Spence of Moby Grape. And of course there’s the one about Norman Greenbaum and the night he wrote “Spirit in the Sky.” To all those legendary drug binges and sex romps might be added my own history with Tom. Last night, as I was driving to the station, I promised myself that I wouldn’t confuse matters by going down that old familiar road.

I don’t know how long I’d been dozing when the song came on. I almost felt it more than heard it, that quiet crescendo, and when I opened my eyes Tom was standing in front of me, a sad smile on his face, a questioning look.

“Come here,” I said. He lay down beside me, the old cushions sinking under his weight.

By the time the words broke quietly through the fog, we were halfway out of our clothes. The song—Dire Straits, “Telegraph Road”—had been a secret code between us ever since the first time he played it for me at the station, more than a decade before. “It’s fourteen minutes long,” he had said then, locking the door behind him. He’d played the song for me a dozen or more times since then, always when we were alone at the station in the middle of the night, and, every time, I had read it as a signal, an invitation.

But this time was different, because I knew it would be the last.

I touched his hair where it grazed his temple, traced a finger along his eyebrow. I love his eyebrows; they’re wild, out of control, and seem to grow more unruly by the year. You could send him to a spa and a tailor and a personal shopper, and he’d still manage to look as if he’d just rolled out of bed. The clothes designers make
these days, with some mythical metrosexual male in mind, never look right on Tom. He’s too tall, for one thing, and too broad in the shoulders to fit into those skinny shirts. In high school he eschewed the obvious sport, basketball, and instead played baseball and ran cross-country. He still has a runner’s shape from behind.

In photographs, side by side, we look comically mismatched. Even in my highest heels, I’m dwarfed by him. While he doesn’t have the kind of looks that translate well in photos—there’s something slightly off in the symmetry of his face, a vague and misleading suggestion of a history of fistfights—I can still glance at him from across a room and feel all those familiar stirrings. Even at our worst, during those times when we seemed to be fighting all the time, I wanted to go to bed with him. Sex was easily the best and least complicated thing about our marriage; I can’t imagine life without it.

Last night, it was just as good as always, maybe better. All that sadness, all that history, distilled into one final act. Maybe I could live without his companionship at movies. Maybe I could live without his familiar presence at the breakfast table, the constant, comforting refrain of us. But how can I live without this?

Tom’s hands smelled like the soap they keep in the bathroom at the station, a concoction of lemongrass and sage that always makes me sneeze. At some point we knocked over a Coke someone had left on the table in front of the couch. It sank into the carpet, making soft fizzing sounds.

As the Dire Straits song was coming to an end, Tom got up, pulled on his pants, and hurried out of the room. He was too late. On the intercom I could hear the final notes of “Telegraph Road” as Tom was running down the hallway, and then I counted the seconds of silence—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four—before his voice came on the air.

“That was four seconds of silence,” he said. “Which is about how long you’d have to defend yourself from a bear who’s charging at you from a hundred feet. So if you’re headed to Yosemite this weekend, keep that in mind.”

A minute later, Tom came back. “You’re dressed,” he told me.

“You’re not.” I tossed him his shirt.

He stood looking at me, the shirt in his hand. Our bodies were aging. When did that happen? For so long, we’d been young, and then, quite suddenly, we weren’t. A few of the hairs on his chest had turned gray; I’d never noticed it before. It made me feel a deep tenderness toward him.

“That was nice,” he said.

“Better than nice.”

He put his shirt on, buttoned it. I followed him into the studio and took my place in the chair against the wall. I had sat here so many times, watching him work. I wouldn’t be doing this again, either. It’s the reverse of falling in love, when everything is sweet and exciting, when everything is a first that raises the question, Will this happen again?

“Jules,” he said, turning his chair to face me, “I love you.”

“It’s the oxytocin,” I said, attempting a joke.

He didn’t laugh.

“The biological love drug. When a woman has an orgasm, her body releases oxytocin, which creates a sense of bonding. She’s lying there with the man inside her, and all of a sudden her body is flooded with this hormone that makes her feel close to him. Biologically speaking, it’s probably there to ensure the woman’s fidelity, or at least her ongoing affection, increasing the chances that the man will provide for her young. Funny thing is, when the male orgasms, his body releases only a fraction of what hers does.”

“In that case,” he retorted, “you should be the one saying you love
me
, because I’m pretty sure that was an orgasm you had at the end there.” He was fiddling with the controls, and Admiral Radley came on, “I Heart California.”

“There’s a trick,” I said.

“A trick?”

“When we were on the couch, in the middle of it, I was rubbing circles in the small of your back, remember?”

“Of course I remember. It’s one of my favorite things that you do.”

“Funny thing is, for men, being rubbed in the small of the back has the same hormonal effect an orgasm does for women. It releases a superdose of oxytocin.”

He rolled his chair over to me, put his hands on my knees. “Did they teach you that in medical school?”

“No,” I laughed, “I read it in
Glamour
.”

Even as he spoke, his fingers were tapping to the beat. Tom glanced at the ceiling, just for a second, and I knew from the look on his face that he was silently admiring the song. He had a talent for distractedness that had always driven me nuts. I’d be spilling my heart out, thinking he was right there with me, but then I’d realize his mind was miles away.

“You’re just going to Norway,” I said, shaking my head.

That got his attention. He stopped tapping his fingers, looked me in the eyes. “I swear I’m not.”

Going to Norway—our code phrase for some dream Tom plans to pursue but doesn’t follow through on. One of the things I loved about him when we met was his relentless energy, his endless dreaming. He was always coming up with some big plan, and it took me a while to realize that the more manic his enthusiasm was for a project, the less likely he was to implement it. “Let’s go to Norway for our anniversary,” he announced to me during our first year of marriage. “We’ll spend two weeks. We’ll see the fjords, we’ll drink hot chocolate in Bergen.” I loved the idea. I bought travel guides, researched plane fares and lodging, invested in thick down coats for both of us, began mapping out an itinerary. As my plans grew more concrete, Tom’s enthusiasm waned. When it came time to confirm our reservations, he hedged. “Listen,” he said, “I think we need to do something closer to home this year. Work is busier than I expected. Let’s save Norway for next year.” So we went to Mendocino. Instead of two weeks in Norway, we spent three nights in a bed-and-breakfast by the sea. I was hugely disappointed, but I figured we
would go to Norway the following year. We didn’t. When our third anniversary rolled around, those travel books were still on the bookshelf, and the big down coats, which we’d tried on only once, laughing at our Michelin Man physiques, had never left the closet.

Long after I’d come to understand that what my husband said wasn’t necessarily what he did, I still admired the boldness of his ambitions—everything from buying a piece of land in Hopland (which he did) to starting his own radio station (which he didn’t) to building a beautiful set of bookshelves by hand (which he did) to learning how to surf Kelly’s Cove (which he didn’t). I was the type to calculate all the obstacles in my way and, using those calculations, decide whether something was worth pursuing. I had always secretly liked the fact that for Tom, the next big possibility was always just around the corner.

Now he had it in his head that the next big possibility was, once again, us, but I saw the warning signs.

“Admit it,” I said. “I always know when you’re going to Norway.”

He pulled my chair closer. “It’s an art, not a science. You have been wrong.”

“I’ve got to get some sleep. Wake me up before you leave.”

“You can sleep anytime,” he said, frowning. “I’ll make some coffee. We can talk.”

I’d heard it before. He stays up all night and sleeps during the day—a pattern he established long before he became the Voice of Midnight. A small percentage of the population is neurologically wired to be nocturnal; surely, Tom belongs to that subset. He would never admit it, but I know he views my work schedule suspiciously. In the beginning of our marriage, I made an effort to go to shows with him as often as possible. I was never cut out for it, though, even in my twenties: staying out until three in the morning listening to some band he insisted I’d be crazy to miss, then waking with a monster headache and pounding back coffee and aspirin before morning rounds. Eventually, I stopped going to the shows with him. One night several years ago, when I bowed out of backstage passes to an
Ogres show at the Bottom of the Hill, Tom couldn’t hide his disappointment. “You’re not as fun as you used to be,” he complained.

“I’m doing a diagnostic lecture with seventy-five first-year residents tomorrow morning. I need to sleep.”

“Right.” He turned away. “I forgot what an important person I’m married to.”

Later, he apologized, but his barb had struck the heart of a fundamental difference between us. He’s the perpetual big kid, always up for fun; I’m the serious one. During the years with Ethan, we were more in sync than at any other time in our marriage. I’d finally found a way to let my guard down, experiencing the world through Ethan’s eyes. I worked saner hours and learned to say no to unnecessary commitments—conference appearances, weekend volunteer work. For a while, I stopped publishing, surprised to discover that I didn’t really miss it. Meanwhile, Tom became more settled. He took wholeheartedly to the role of father; when he wasn’t working, he was home. He no longer felt the need to see every new act that came through town. We developed an affection for places that had held no interest for us before: the zoo, the Discovery museum, the old cannons of the Presidio, where Ethan loved to climb. To our astonishment, domesticity suited both of us.

And then we lost Ethan. If there was one defining rupture in our marriage, an unforeseen event that rearranged everything, it was this. A loss that neither of us was prepared to face. One that we failed to see each other through.

After that, the ground shifted so slowly, I’m not sure either of us noticed it for what it was. I retreated into my work, into the seriousness of my days, while Tom started going out more often, staying out later, hanging out with an increasingly rowdy crowd. He’d do things that were completely ordinary in his world: the occasional line of coke, a weekend here and there in Vegas, snowboarding trips to Tahoe with guys from the station on slopes way beyond his skill level, one of which ended in a broken collarbone. It was nothing extreme, really, but it was enough to make me wonder, sometimes,
what we were doing together. When he watched me fall into bed at nine o’clock at night, exhausted from a day with patients, uninterested in the new Wilco album he wanted to play for me, he must have wondered the same thing.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m married to my college boyfriend,” I’d said last year, after a long argument that had left us both drained and weary. “It’s as though you think less of me for not doing the beer bong when I have finals in the morning.”

“And sometimes I feel like I’m married to my college professor,” he snapped. “Like you’re evaluating every move I make, judging whether or not I measure up.”

When your marriage breaks up, you look for easy answers. Not long ago, I was fooling around online when I came across an interesting study involving factory workers in Boston; it found that marriages in which one partner works the night shift and the other partner works the day shift are twice as likely to end in divorce. I forwarded the article to Tom, who sent back a one-word response, tongue-in-cheek:
bingo
.

Sometimes, a divorce is a series of failures piled one upon another, a laundry list of hurts and disappointments and missed communication, and other times, something big happens, some cataclysmic event that tests the foundations of your marriage. But how do you know, before it happens, whether or not you’re prepared? San Francisco burned in 1906 because the city was built of wood, and the existing infrastructure was unequipped to deal with the flames that followed the quake. The Bay Bridge collapsed in 1989 because it hadn’t been built properly to begin with. Californians are always waiting for the big one. In the hall closet, we have a large Rubbermaid box that serves as an emergency kit, containing water, canned food, first aid items, flashlights, important phone numbers, five hundred dollars in cash, and one of Tom’s hand-crank radios. But there’s no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.