It was a Thursday evening, according to my old notebook, and I had been packing to spend a week without my husband while house sitting for friends. Neither of us knew whether I would go through with the planned time away, or what would happen when the break was over.

We were watching a popular sitcom. The young lead’s romance was not going well. I put no details on the page, not even the name of the show; but I can remember the song that was playing as the young couple danced. All I need to hear now is the trio of saxophones playing behind Billy Vera, his voice cracking with heartache, and the shape of that night reemerges.

I can see the room clearly. The six-pillow sofa, brown corduroy for the seats and back, batik print for the sides, stuffed onto a hinged frame that folded easily during the five times we moved in three years before settling into a holding pattern in the second floor apartment of an old stone house. I meant to paint the institutional green walls pale yellow every summer of the six years we lived there. Large, leaky windows let in plenty of light and too much wind. The rattan rug with the loose stitching didn’t succeed in hiding the mustard- colored  wool carpet underneath. Our small black and white TV sat knee high on the smooth center of a split black walnut log mounted on several smaller branches from the same tree.

It is harder to picture the two of us. At first, I conjure myself in a robe like the one my mother once made for me when I was a child, although I doubt I owned a robe in March of 1986. I wore suits to work, gray or navy blue, like they were uniforms. One new pair of acid washed jeans hung in my closet, a guilty splurge. We were behind on the bills, but I’d grown weary of wearing his cast-off Levi cords. I probably wore sweats. That apartment was never warm enough in winter. I was a sad, small child in spirit that night, but memory is not allowed to reach back across the years and wrap that girl in the comfort of soft flannel.

He is somewhere in the four rooms of the apartment that opened off a square center hall. But even if he is sitting at the other end of the couch, we couldn’t be further apart. At our most recent marriage counseling session, I had asked for changes in the marriage. I don’t remember whether I got the chance to say what those changes were. I didn’t write them down. I only remember what he said in response. “She’s not supposed to need anything.” His anger has been on a low simmer since we left the counselor’s office.

His presence makes me uneasy. I am not used to him being home in the evenings. He finished his culinary training a few weeks ago, but he hasn’t accepted a position yet. Soon he will take the offer to set up a new restaurant in the downtown office building where I work. I didn’t know, curled up in my corner of the couch that night trying not to set him off, that in the months ahead he would sometimes wait for me in the lobby and follow me to the train, or that he would use the building’s janitor, a zealous Eastern European Christian man, as an intermediary to deliver my mail and ask,  When you will get back together with husband?

The plot of the show we are watching is predictable. Tonight, the boy is losing the girl he decided was “the one” a few episodes back. This is a comedy. By season’s end, they will reunite. In real life they will marry. And still, when they kiss and then she bolts away, I am ready to cry for the fictional couple on the screen as well as for the two of us breaking apart in real life.

Did I ask him to make me a cup of tea when he went to the kitchen? Did he “forget,” or tell me to make it myself; or did he bring it to me this time, in an eleventh hour effort to be kind? It doesn’t matter how the mug reached my hands. It’s the words he used at the end of the commercial break that I cannot forget. “You know, there were a lot of times when I knew what you wanted,” he said. “I just didn’t want to do it.”

The next morning after he went to work, I left.

*****

Back then, when something hurt me, it could take weeks, even months, for me to absorb the experience. The long delay was a form of self-protection, a deliberate misalignment that let me ignore what was difficult until I felt safely removed from the source of the pain. This time, it took only a few days alone and a long walk to understand the meaning of what my husband said.

I started out from Fairmount, struggling block after block with the realization that I had fallen out of love again. I wrestled with my failure. Why could he no longer make me believe him when he said he loved me? If only it was my husband, not Billy Vera, singing in my head, begging me to stay. When I reached Society Hill, I turned back. The change in direction set my thoughts on a new course. I began to walk in time to my husband’s voice saying “I knew what you wanted and I didn’t want to do it.” A chill ran down my spine, but I couldn’t blame the raw wind off the river. The repetition brought the meaning of his words into focus. He no longer loved me either. I was free to go.