Apart Together

by Charles C. Cole

My cool-headed partner, Bernadette, and I were married more than half my life, but I never met her co-workers and she never met mine. She worked for a world-renowned financial institution with no in-state facility. For many years, she left home early Monday mornings and returned Friday evenings.

“If absence makes the heart grow fonder,” I sometimes joked, “we should be more ardently in love now than in the heyday of our whirlwind courtship.”

During the start of the pandemic, Bernie and I were asked by our respective employers to work from home, until further notice. Everyone was doing it. I was an independent contractor engaged as a trainer for a large local hospital. I suppose we were lucky to have such an option, without losing our jobs or being furloughed. She sat facing her laptop a mere arm's-length from me and mine; one might say her virtual office was catty-cornered to my own.

I was quietly staring at her once, waiting for the last of my students to come online, appreciating her pokable philtrum, the tiny soft cleft between her button nose and glimmering full lips.

“Stop it,” she said, without glancing up or over. “You look like the cat that ate the canary.”

“I feel like the cat that ate the canary,” I said, and I meant it.

I don't recall any discussions about the effects of, disproportionately, spending so much time together after so much time apart. Now, looking back, it seems analogous to a relationship-threatening case of the bends, that dangerous deep-sea diver's medical condition caused by rising to the surface too quickly after operating in protracted silence, deep underwater.

Bernie's official dress code was: Dressed up from the chest up, but you wouldn't know it to look at her. She could have been moments from an in-person deposition before the Supreme Court. In college, we'd shared a dandified history professor, emigrated from central Europe, who'd stressed, in battle and in life the right coat of armor makes all the difference to success or failure. Bernie, more than me, took this axiom deeply to heart.

One intense day, if such can be measured by the length of our uninterrupted silence, while Bernie participated in yet another global videoconference call, I accidentally spilled a half-empty soup bowl of forgotten, room-temperature coffee in her direction. She did not swear or startle, but she gave me a look that might have stopped the heart of a man of lesser constitution.

A little over a week later, Bernie determined that it was best that she move across the house to a corner of the living room. At an upscale consignment store, she found a puce wing chair and a small, antique sewing table, with an imprinted yardstick on its surface. When she brought them home, I told her I thought the table was equal parts handsome and rickety.

“It's too late now,” she said. “It doesn't matter. Honey, my manager expects me to turn a shitshow into an opera. I need to concentrate.”

“You're a survivor,” I said, and I meant it.

One night as we prepared for bed, Bernie stood in the middle of the room in a flower-print silk blouse and peach-colored half-slip, absorbed by a barrage of messages to her phone.

“Do you miss the hotel?” I asked, pulling her into conversation.

“They pick up after me, send my clothes to be dry-cleaned, make my meals. I don't have to be distracted by little mundane things.”

“From now on, I'll make the bed and the coffee. It's the least I can do.”

“Don't be silly, Chessie,” she said.

“How big is the bed in Boston?” I pushed.

“King-sized. It's more than I need. I usually leave my laptop or suitcase on one side. But, I'll admit it, I love all the pillows and the fresh, clean smell.”

“Do we have a queen-sized bed?” I asked, hoping it wasn't too much of a change.

“Just full-sized.”

“But it feels so roomy,” I said, and I meant it.

“Not to worry. It looks like we're going back to the office soon, maybe end of next month.”

“It'll be good for you.”

“This hasn't been all bad,” she said.

“I got to see how important you are,” I said.

Bernie adjusted her alarm clock and mumbled, “There's a rumor a lot of people will be quitting. They like working from home. The company's offered me a raise to keep me from jumping ship.”

“We'd go back to a part-time marriage?”

“You said it: the sewing table is rickety. Besides, I figure ten more years of this, and I can retire.”

“Would you like that?” I asked.

“Would you?”

“You love being productive,” I said.

“It's a means to an end.”

“Does that make me the end?” I asked, though I wasn't certain I wanted to know the answer.

“You're the beginning, middle, and the end,” she said with an earnestness that gave me chills.

“Which part are we in now?”

“Get out of your head. The blank page between one chapter and another. That's all. Turn the lights off and kiss me goodnight.”

We went back to our old routine. It wasn't as hard as I expected it. She called every night. She kissed me when she left and kissed me when she returned. Secretly, unavoidably, I counted down to her retirement. But it never happened, because she fell asleep at the wheel. Thank Goodness nobody else was hurt; she would have been mortified.

* * *

At night alone, I sometimes rewatch movies we'd seen in the theaters when they were first released, long ago. Her wing chair is too straight-backed and narrow for me, so it sits unused. But I often use her antique sewing table for my microwaved dinner. I was wrong; it's not as rickety as I thought.