He Was the Daisies

When what we called the Marital Sabbatical was over and done with and I hit the couch

with an aching heart, my therapist asked me to describe my marriage. On paper, and to all

outward appearances, we made a great couple. Late thirties, well-educated, healthy and

attractive, good jobs. Jim as a handsomely paid associate in a top law firm, me as a

conservationist at a top art museum. (“We’re the tops,” I once sang to Jim, a little drunk on both

Cole Porter and Veuve Clicquot.) Brownstone duplex with a garden in Cobble Hill. We were the

kind of couple who read the Times together in bed on Sunday mornings and took sporty

vacations twice a year: scuba diving in the Caribbean, skiing at Vail. That kind of thing.

No kids, by mutual agreement. We just didn’t much like them.

But oh my god after ten years we were so bored with each other, and boredom turned to

irritation. The sight of his socks on the floor could send me into a rage, and I dumped them in the

garbage. If I rummaged through my purse in search of a lipstick, he rolled his eyes and made

impatient grunts. When we ate out, we most often sat in stone-cold silence, glaring at each other.

Little things, little things that were adding up to one big fireball of contempt and scarcely

repressed hostility.

And then one night, forking Chinese straight from the carton, watching an old Preston

Sturges comedy on our gigantissimo TV, Jim said, “I think we’ve hit the end of the road.”

I chewed thoughtfully. I looked at the ceiling. I said slowly, “So? What now? Divorce?”

“No. I have been thinking this over.” He said in the lawyerly voice I knew well, the

lawyerly voice that could argue, “Edie, you don’t really want to buy a Peloton, do you? We don’t

really need five kinds of mustard scattered all around the fridge, do we?” And after looking at

my browser history, “I don’t think you really want to get filler for your frown lines.”

He sighed deeply. “Let’s get sensible here.”

I gave him my wide-eyed “let’s-get-sensible” look. “What about therapy?” I said,

knowing full well how much Jim hated therapists, whom he claimed screwed up his entire

family. I just wanted to poke the bear a little.

“We’ve had ten more-or-less good years. I think we need some time off. We need a

sabbatical.”

“Oh, yeah. And how is that going to work, in this great city of out-of-sight real estate?

With our demanding jobs, our carefully structured family holidays?”

“Well, I haven’t thought it through that far.”

I considered dumping a carton of lo-mein on top of his artfully tousled, expensively

sheared head.

But in the days following, hunched over the badly cracked Poussin landscape I’d been

working on for months, I began to see the appeal of it. We needed a break, we’d set some ground

rules, part as friends for a while. I began to get excited by the idea.

Oh, to be a single girl in the city again! It would not be like graduate school redux, where

I had a whole gang of pals, but I would be able to move at my own pace, see movies he didn’t

care about, sleep late on weekends. I would not have to listen to him pronounce nuclear and

pianist as nukular and peeanist. For a while, at least.

By the time we got to the bargaining table, as it were, over mocktails at the Campbell

Apartment in Grand Central, his favorite bar, I was thoroughly psyched. Jim had his briefcase

with him, and I almost expected him to pull out papers. Instead he had a small notebook and his

Montblanc pen. He was looking exceptionally natty in a blue blazer with an open-necked white

shirt.

“You are looking exceptionally natty,” I said.

He gave me the look: glasses pulled down on his nose, swimmy brown eyes peering over

the frames. My mother always said he had “bedroom eyes.” Whatever that meant.

“You’re pretty cute yourself.”

I was not. I was in jeans and an oversized T-shirt that said “Rousseau Rocks,” giveaway

merch from a recent show at the museum.

“So you wanna make small talk for a while? Or shall we just get down to business?”

“Let’s first discuss real estate.” At the top his notebook page, he printed “APARTMENT” in big capitals.

“Well, of course, we’re not putting the duplex on the market.”

“No of course not,” he replied steadily. “But I would say the first one who finds a viable

floating life raft, so to speak, moves out.”

And then this whole plan started hitting me bad. The thought of big cardboard boxes, the

screech of packing tape. A childhood of too many moves had left me with a serious dread of

upheaval. Before Jim and I relocated from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, I spent a week on

Valium.

He picked up on my terror. “We’re not talking major upheaval here. One of us will score

a furnished sublet for a year. If we give up vacations and drinks in places like this, we should be

able to swing it.”

“What about the cat?”

“You take the cat, if you can,” he said. “I’ve never been that attached to her.”

I stared at my blood-red tart cherry Shirley Temple. I couldn’t lift my eyes to his. “What

about sex?”

And now he sounded really pissed. “Yeah, well, what about sex? This is a trial

separation, Edie, not an excuse to frolic like grad students high on gummies.”

It almost seemed like he knew what I was thinking. “Well, as you know,” I said carefully,

“it’s been a little lame between the two of us lately.”

“Oh, yeah.” He pushed his chair away from the table, crossed his legs. “And I suppose

that’s my fault?”

We were building up to a big one. “Come on, let’s head downtown for cheap Korean and

cold beer. We can still afford that.”

And for the first time in months, I took his arm as we walked out of Grand Central.

Anyone who has lived in New York knows that real estate is a very big deal. Among our

crowd, which is to say upwardly mobile millennials (hey, I’m not always proud of this

demographic, but there we are), co-op and condo prices, rising rents, negligent landlords, hostile

co-op boards—the whole apparatus of upper-middle-class urban living—are the prime topics of

dinner-party conversations. Anyone who has managed to score a rent-stabilized space is looked

on with awe and respect, as if he or she had won a Guggenheim.

But the real-estate gods were looking down on me with sympathy and understanding, and

after I put the word out through my work and alumni grapevine, a lovely one-bedroom garden

apartment on the Upper West Side dropped into my waiting arms. It had oak wainscoting and

charming brass light fixtures, a king-sized brass bed, and shelves of classic novels and art books.

The garden in the back got a few hours of sunlight and was surrounded by high walls to

discourage feline escapes. The owner was an academic at NYU, an assistant professor of

medieval lit headed off on sabbatical to Paris to work on a new edition of the Lais of Marie de

France. We bonded over a shared love of manuscript illumination and when I told her I’d

worked on restoring a prestigious book of hours for the museum, I knew I was a shoo-in. I told

her that I, too, was taking a sabbatical of sorts, and explained the circumstances, adding that it

was all very civilized and adult. She didn’t ask many questions beyond wanting to know if I was

comfortable paying six months’ rent in advance. I was, and I tore a check from my checkbook

then and there.

Jim was not exactly thrilled when I told him of my coup.

“So. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“You’re the one who suggested this,” I reminded him. “I can’t exactly back out now.”

“I didn’t think things would happen so fast.” He looked so downcast I wanted to crawl

into his lap and take his face between my hands. I restrained myself. He was not big on

spontaneous displays of affection.

But to my surprise, one weekend in early May, he helped me pack up suitcases and boxes

and we smashed Furble into her carrier and headed up the West Side Highway in our Subaru

Outback to my new place in the West 80s.

After we unloaded, he sat uneasily on the couch while I made espresso in the tiny stand-

up kitchen.

The demitasse cup looked absurd in his big hands. “It’s hard to believe this is really

happening,” he said.

“Look at it this way. It’s an experiment. We may be saving our marriage.”

“I’ll miss you,” he said sadly.

“And I will miss you too.” And then I brightened. “You could visit! Did you see the size

of that bed?”

“I would feel like I was messing around in some stranger’s apartment.”

“Don’t you think that could be fun?”

“No.”

He permitted me a peck on the cheek, and I heaved a deep sigh as I closed the door

behind him. Then I scooped up the cat and settled in for a huge nap in my new landlady’s huge

bed.

I adapted easily to my single-woman routine. Many mornings I could walk to work

through Central Park, feeling at one with that great surge of humanity making its purposeful way

in running shoes or on bikes toward school or gainful employment or even maybe just park-

bench loitering. Other days I took the bus to and fro. At night I made myself a gin and tonic with

lime and, as the spring days lengthened, sipped it in the garden, Furble on my lap, my head

tipped back to enjoy the narrow slice of sky. I didn’t feel cramped in my new quarters, which

were about a third the size of our Brooklyn apartment. I felt safe.

Family and friends, as was to be expected, presented a tricky obstacle course. I told my

best friend in all the world, Caroline, who was happily entrapped in suburban motherhood. She

was aghast. “But Jim’s such a nice guy!

“You don’t live with him,” I said. “Nobody can ever see inside anyone else’s marriage.”

“Have a baby before it’s too late. Motherhood will change your whole life."

"No thanks."

My mother, in our usual monthly lunches, sussed out something close to the truth

immediately. “You’re having an affair.”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because you seem relaxed and happy.”

“Have I been so obviously unhappy in the past?”

“Nooooo.” She took a sip of her martini. My mother is thrice-married. On her third

round, she had landed a fat-cat investment banker. He bought her a classic six on Park Avenue

and she took to the lifestyle of pampered kept woman immediately, forswearing her younger

days of bra-burning feminism, the role model I grew up with. The one who insisted makeup and

clothes were frivolous and men were only useful as sperm banks. My mother was a chameleon,

my mother was a sell-out, but so charming everyone adored her. Especially Jim. And the feeling

was reciprocated. The first time I brought him home, when she was married to husband number

two, she pulled me aside in the kitchen and said, “He’s the one. Don’t fuck this up.”

“It’s just that I’ve noticed some tension between the two of you,” she added.

“Like, how we pick on each other at social gatherings?” I said. “Like, the way I call him

‘Lurch’ behind his back?”

My mother tapped her impeccably manicured nails against the table. “You need to be

careful in a marriage. The closer you become, the more careful you need to be. I should know

that from experience.”

And then I told her about the Marital Sabbatical. “So that’s why I seem happier. I’m on

my own again, and I’m loving it!”

“Well,” said my mother, “I hope you know what you’re doing. I’d hate to see some other

cupcake walk off with the cash cow.”

Yes, of course there were moments when I missed him acutely. I missed snuggling

against his big warm back in bed in the mornings. I missed the sight of his oxford-cloth shirts

hanging in the closet, neatly arranged by color—white, pale blue, and even a couple of pink

ones. Sometimes I simply missed the way he looked in repose: the lock of hair that fell rakishly

over his forehead; his rugged profile, which seemed to be carved from stone; his extremely

sensuous mouth, whose contours I used to trace while he slept.

We had terse disappointing exchanges on the phone, not hostile but not exactly

affectionate either. And we met up for the July 4th holiday at his parents’ house in New Jersey,

doing our best to pretend everything was A-okay. As he floated in the deep end of the pool, I

swam up close and whispered in his ear, “Hey, baby, wanna fuck?” He looked at me as though I

was an apparition from the primeval ooze.

We had a few meetups, I guess you would call them, dinners at a restaurant near his

office downtown, never anywhere near our home turf in Brooklyn or my new sublet. Awkward

encounters, even when thoroughly greased by booze. Jim was never one to talk about emotions,

to hint at an interior life, if he had one.

It wasn’t always that way. They say people don’t change. Well, he did. When I met him

thirteen years ago at a party in the Village, he was funny and courtly and impulsive. He always

walked ahead of me if the wind was fierce in winter; he brought home unexpected treats—a tin

of Beluga, a bunch of flaming red poppies—when we first set up housekeeping on Avenue A. It

seemed like as the years wore on, as he made more and more money, he became ever more

remote.

“So,” I asked at one of these encounters, “should we be having, like, progress reports?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “I’m not sure we know what we’re doing.”

“Me neither.” I reached across the table to grab his hand. He snatched it away and glared

at me.

“Hey, you know,” I said. “This was your idea.”

I had pangs of acute loneliness, the untethered sadness of the newly solo. Shopping for

one on my way home from work. Doing my tiny loads of laundry in the basement of the

building. Missing the stupid day-to-day chatter of marriage (Have you seen my blue tights? Can

you pick up my suit from the dry cleaners? Did you see that new wine bar on Atlantic?) But I

also had waves of longing (oh, all right, just call it horniness), when I woke up sticky with sweat

and fell to self-pleasuring with my newly acquired vibrator (something Jim would never have

approved; he said we didn’t need sex toys).

So I was vulnerable when a guy started hitting on me as I was eating my salad-bar lunch

straight from the container on a bench in Riverside Park one fine early September afternoon. At

least it seemed what he was doing; it had been so long I wasn’t sure.

“That looks really good,” he said, nodding at the gummy mix of tomatoes and chickpeas

in my box.

I smiled hesitantly. I wasn’t sure what to say. He seemed all right, even attractive in the

running shorts that showed off his nicely toned legs. I pegged him at forty-ish; salt-and-pepper

hair; a coiled bandanna wrapped around his forehead.

“Want some?” I said impulsively, my plastic fork in mid-air.

He tipped his head back and let out a laugh that was more of a bellow. “Nooooo. I’m not

trying to steal your lunch.”

“Then why are you here?”

He looked at me closely. He had the most amazing pale gray eyes. “I’m on a breather

from a five-mile run. And you looked so fetching in your striped tee and jaunty straw hat.

“Fetching?” I said. “That’s not a word people often use anymore.”

He reflected a moment. “Nor is jaunty. But so what?”

“Are you hitting on me?”

“Yes,” he admitted. He had a low voice that sounded trained, like a voiceover from radio

commercials for expensive cars. “Is that a problem?”

“Might be. How do you know I’m not married?”

“No ring,” he answered. “Saturday lunch alone.”

I bristled. I seldom wore my big showy rings because it was hard to pull on the Latex

gloves I used at work. “Even married people are allowed to eat alone now and then.”

“But I don’t think you are. So how about having a drink with me later?”

I considered briefly. A drink. What harm in that?

“Let’s say six at the Boatyard. If you live in this neighborhood, as I do, you probably

know it Just next to the 79th Street Boat Basin.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Peter, by the way.”

I heard the low whistle from the bar before I saw him. Oh, my. It had been so long since a

man gave me an appreciative stare. I was in a black sun dress with shoulder straps, my hair up.

He was in jeans, in that sexy manspreading stance, half-off the barstool, that seems meant

to advertise the equipment.

“You look fantastic,” he said, as I slipped in next to him. I’m ashamed to say I was

blushing, and blushing because I was blushing. In general, I am not really a blusher. “I take you

for a white-wine kind of gal, so allow me to recommend the Pinot Gigio.”

BIO

Ann Landi, an art journalist/critic for the last three decades (The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews), has only recently turned to fiction. East Coast born and raised, she now lives in Taos, New Mexico, where she publishes a weekly Substack newsletter for artists.