Coping with Groping and Living Apart

If there was one thing Milton Lemlach looked forward to on Sunday nights it was his wife's walk back from work. Marie's twelve-hour nursing shift ended at eight thirty, paperwork permitting, and she'd be back in the apartment that she subletted by nine to shower and get into bed for barely enough time to be rested for Monday's third and final shift of the week. The train ride back Upstate to their newly-purchased home was often hard for her, her heart still belonging to New York and its promising lights, but Milton was always there waiting at the station to help her with her bags and open the car door for her. It was a consolation prize that she'd learned to live with for the greater good of their relationship. Her sacrifice didn't go unnoticed.

Why did he enjoy Sunday nights in particular? Most people were on their living room couches or prolonging the surrender to sleep at that time so the Transit Authority saw fit to pare down its bus fleet in order to cut costs; therefore, when Marie called him during her brisk walk back to her rented room he'd be able to hear her more clearly without being subjected to the violent whoosh of passing buses, the accordion-like extended monsters being the most aurally invasive. "Dammit!" he'd yell when it happened, pulling the phone away from his half-deafened ear. "Why can't the rest of the City walk like you do, Marie?" She wouldn't answer. She knew when not to bother. When the streets and avenues were bustling with Saturday night revelers or Monday night commuters getting home late from work she wouldn't make the call to Milton until she was in the quiet safety of four walls. Otherwise, his frustration could be too easily confused with misdirected anger. It made more sense to avoid that sort of thing whenever feasible.

But this was no Sunday night. It was a Saturday, and an unseasonably warm one at that. The hooters and hollerers had joined the buses and taxicabs in the rambunctious pavement symphony with the coming of warm weather. When Marie reached the tranquility of her room she dialed Milton to say goodnight.

"Hey, Moose," she rasped into the mouthpiece of her phone.

"Hey," Milton responded, fighting back a smile wasted on the darkness of their bedroom. Moose was a nickname his junior high friends had given him long ago because of his disproportionately large ears. When his mother had slipped after having too much wine and told that story to Marie it quickly became her new term of endearment for him. She was the only one who was still allowed to call him that without his temperature rising. In fact, he secretly liked it.

"Good walk today. Needed to stretch my legs after such a slow shift."

Weekends tended to be boring at the hospital where she worked. Doctors were off in the Hamptons cheating on their spouses; patients were sleeping through visits from family members to evade any awkward conversations; the literary half of the hospital staff caught up on its reading and crossword puzzles. It wasn't entirely a bad thing, but the lack of things to do made the day drag on endlessly and the muscles tighten from disuse. There was only so much that even the most attentive of nurses could do to keep busy, and Marie was not one for sitting still.

"Anything exciting happen today?" Milton asked out of habit. He knew that someone was probably admitted. He knew that someone else was probably discharged. He knew, and sometimes wished he didn't, that yet another patient had died. Somehow, even though they were faceless for him, the deaths seemed to hit him harder; at least that's how it appeared. It took a special kind of person to deal with that final aspect of life on a daily basis, a gift of lightheartedness and a sense of humor resilient enough to cope with the passage of a soul into the sky and a body into the ground. Milton knew he didn't have either of those traits and respected his wife for her much-needed ability. At first their many differences seemed to be an obstacle, but once their attributes and downfalls had been identified they were able to appreciate how well they complemented one another. It pleased him to know that others were benefiting from their time apart. He liked the idea of sharing such a special woman with a small sector of the sickly world fortunate enough to know her.

"No one died," she said in that sultry voice that made him want to kiss the neck that produced it. Mind-reading was another one of her many talents, though it was one that Milton sometimes despised.

"That's good," he said, passing casually over the topic. "How was your walk home?"

He usually tended to hesitate before saying that last word. To him her home was where he was, sixty miles up the lazy Hudson in a foreclosure that they'd bought for half its value and were in the midst of renovating. Home was the three-bedroom ranch with the mailbox out front onto which Marie had painted "The Lemlachs" on a sunny afternoon, even though she didn't take his name when they'd married. (That'd always confused him, especially since she was so much closer to her mother's side of the family and didn't bear their name anyway.) Home was with him, wherever it was; but for the sake of conversation he used the term loosely. Besides, she'd probably make fun of him if he made such an obvious effort to avoid using the phrase.

"I was accosted by a man a block away from home," Marie said nonchalantly, free from any pauses at all. The proverbial bush was never beaten around when it came time for her to answer a seemingly simple question.

"What do you mean? Are you alright?" Immediately after his concerned response a very small portion of Milton's brain stopped to analyze the sequence of the two questions. Should one have come before the other?

"Yes, yes. Fine. Some drunk guy on the sidewalk put his arm around me and told me I was beautiful. He tried to kiss my cheek, but I pulled away in time." The words left her mouth like a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Perhaps it was the flat delivery, not just the content, that made Milton's ears pound with the pumping of his blood.

"You've got to get out of that neighborhood," he said frantically. "It's not safe."

"Oh please," she laughed. "The same thing could happen while walking the strip of bars downtown up there." The tone with which the last word was delivered suggested that it was hated. In her attempt to write off his worry her ruse of having no remorse for leaving her beloved city had temporarily failed. It didn't matter. Milton still admired her act, lapse in persuasion excused.

"It could, yes. But then again, a meteor could also fall on our house tomorrow. Could and would are two very different words. Too many things could happen here and would happen there. I'm just worried about you being down there alone for three days at a time. What if..." but he didn't bother finishing a sentence that he swore he'd heard his mother say before.

"Look, Milton," she said, clearly done with the loving overtones of Moose for the moment. "You knew it'd be this way. We talked about it before buying the house. If you can't deal with my..." but in a rare display of censorship she too prevented herself from sounding like someone she didn't want to emulate.

"You're right. I'm being silly. I'm sorry. Really. I just care about you so much and don't ever want any harm to come to you while I'm not there to protect you."

"Oh, Moose," Marie cooed into his quieting ear canal. "I love you so much, even though you can't admit you weren't put on this earth to protect me from it."

Milton smiled in the dark again. At least she acknowledged his stubborn crusade.

And the last bit of their short conversation went better than any one that either of the couples that'd spawned them ever had; but some things, even for a writer, are private.