Wednesday. 3:42 PM. Jake is in his office upstairs and I am in mine downstairs and we are both on Zoom, and we have not seen each other since 8:14 this morning, when he came down to make his coffee and I made my coffee and we said good morning and he kissed the top of my head and went back upstairs.
That is the schedule now. It works. Works.
I do not believe in the way it works.
The house is two thousand four hundred square feet and it is the smallest building I have ever been in.
We were never in it together this much. He used to leave at seven and come back at seven, and the house was mine for twelve hours and his for one and ours for four, and we shared it like roommates who liked each other. Now he is here all day and I am here all day and the house is no one's. The house is just the place we both happen to be containing ourselves in.
He has gotten louder. I don't know if he was always this loud and I never heard it because he was always at the office. He takes calls on speakerphone because the wireless headphones he bought during the first week of lockdown have not been charged since the second week. He laughs at things. He laughs the way men laugh on conference calls when they want the call to know they are good guys. Big-hearted Jake. That's a great point, Bill. Right, right, that's the spirit. He has eight rotations of these and I have learned the rotation order.
I close my office door. The door does some of the work. It does not do all of it.
I made a meditation app account last week. I downloaded it. I did not open it. The icon is on my phone and I look at it twice a day and I do not open it.
The phrase self-care has started to grate on me. So has unprecedented times. So has we are all in this together, which is the most untrue thing white people are currently saying to each other on email signature lines.
I am writing a memo for the Westport engagement. It is a leadership readiness assessment for a private equity firm whose principal is going to read three sentences and decide what he thinks. I have spent four hours on it. The four hours is not for him. The four hours is for me. I will know whether the memo is good. He will not. The gap between what I know and what he knows is a gap I have stopped trying to close, because closing it requires a kind of energy I no longer have to spare.
This is not depression. I want to be on record about that. I am sleeping. I am eating. I am exercising on the days I am supposed to exercise. I am doing my job. I am doing my marriage, the version of it that the pandemic permits, which is mostly logistical, which is what we are good at.
It is not depression. It is something else. Some other thing.
I do not know the name of the other thing.
At 7 PM Jake comes downstairs. He is wearing the same sweatpants he was wearing when he came down for coffee. He has a glass of wine. He hands me a glass of wine. He says long day, babe? and I say good day, the way I have said good day since 2007, and he says that's good, and he sits on the other end of the couch and we both put on the next episode of the show we are not enjoying.
I drink the wine. I do not enjoy the wine. I have stopped trying to enjoy the things I am drinking. The wine is just the thing that makes the next four hours of being on this couch acceptable.
I look at him during a slow part of the show. He is on his phone. He is reading something. His face is the face of a man whose life is going fine.
His life is going fine.
I think — and I will not say this out loud, and I will not write it in any record that anyone can find — that I am not in his life anymore. I think I have been somewhere else for a long time. I think the pandemic is the thing that finally pushed us into the same room long enough for me to notice.
I notice.
Then I look back at the show.
The episode ends. The next one starts. He gets up to refill our glasses. He kisses the top of my head when he comes back.
I drink the second glass.
I do not write any of this down. The memo for Westport is open in another window. I will get back to it after the third glass.