There are many things I cannot make my husband understand. Math. The fact that microbes and diseases do not have a five-second rule. How computers work. The thing I have most failed at getting him to understand is how hotels work.
They do not like checking you in at 8am. They will if they can, if they have to, but they do not like it. And they never guarantee it. Yet, every year, he asks me to tell them to be sure to let him in when he arrives at eight in the morning. He can’t bear the idea of making the reservation a day early, and in my experience, arriving after midnight often loses you the room anyway.
And so, once again, I am awake at two in the morning, which is a lovely time for artists and the young, but absolute hell on this old woman who has risen just after dawn much of her life. He leaves in the middle of the night, he says, because he doesn’t like traffic. It’s time for his yearly sojourn to San Diego for Comic Con. After twenty-five years of marriage, of course he can’t leave the house without waking me up. He tries. But even the seven-pound cat wakes me up as it slinks down the stairs to watch his best friend be swallowed up by the giant tin can and roll away. We are old, and we wake easily.
We also lose the thread of many conversations.
Ah, yes. The things my husband won’t understand. He’ll arrive in Bakersfield at the crack of dawn at the start of his three-day journey from San Francisco to San Diego, a journey most of us do in one. Some years he had to sleep in his car until his hotel room was ready, but as the planet warms, that becomes a more and more difficult thing to pull off. It’s going to be a hundred degrees in Bako today. God help him.
After a few decades of him starting out in the middle of the night, I know to call the hotel ahead of time and warn them, and they warn me that it’s not a matter of do they want to, but a matter of is there a clean room available, and me warning him but it all sort of settles in his mind in the place where words like “adjective” and “compound interest” settle, a dark corner that is seldom disturbed.
I wouldn’t be able to stay awake, especially along the 100 mile stretch before he turns off Highway 5 to angle toward Bakersfield. He stays there to…well, he tells me why every year, but it is a thing he cannot make me understand. It has something to with the fact that before we reunited, he lived in Bako and drove to Comic Con from there. San Diego is a neat four hours if you leave in the middle of the night from the nethermost region of the Central Valley. And I’ll grant him this, avoiding traffic in the LA Basin is a good plan.
His lifelong habit was settled until I dragged him, kicking and screaming, to live in San Francisco. We have created a mostly charming life of genteel poverty here, nestled in between two families who had to leave the Fillmore in 1960 because they were Black. They never said it that way, but the history lines up. Despite our being white and often very stupid, they are kind to us.
Where was I?
Oh, I remember. I dragged him five hours farther away from the Con, so he simply bolted the new distance on to his existing habit. He says different, of course. He says it helps him “get ready,” that he likes to shop the antique malls for swords and exotic knives. Not because he’s insane but because he used to fence. Qualified for nationals, but his hideous family wouldn’t help him get to New York to compete. That’s why I’m here, really. Because I love him and a life spent showing him how good people treat each other is a life not entirely wasted. Back then, there were ex-girlfriends and a wonderful man who played Fafhrd to his Gray Mouser. But since I frightened all the exes away, and his friend’s health is largely failing, I honestly thought he’d just make the drive straight through. He cannot bring himself to do so. And I can’t bring myself to insist.
He was a wild pirate of a man three decades ago, but has settled into avuncular raconteurhood with great ease, whereas I am still shy without a medicinal whisky in hand. I went with him to Comic Con until that year the Twilight moms and daughters showed up. It’s not their fault I couldn’t bear it–being surrounded by 180,000 people was about 125,000 people too many for me. Also, seeing fans who’d spent too much money to be wasting most of their day in line for a talk by their favorite actors and artists and writers, only to be turned away at the door when the hall was full, made me sad. One year, they nearly killed Ray Bradbury by dragging him out in the heat to sign autographs. In his handlers’ defense, it was an unusually hot year under the sails.
This year I finally asked him why, why, why not schedule his drive to arrive in Bako at checkin time? It’s a Saturday, there’s no commute traffic. And then I listened to his answer. And I smiled and nodded, and in the moment I really did understand. But now it is the middle of the night, and I am wide awake, unable to do anything but feel the first pangs of missing him. He will arrive just after dawn at a suburban hotel, and be surprised again if he has to wait in the lobby or sleep in the car.
A long and happy marriage, it turns out, is not making the other guy understand what you know. It’s accepting the limitations of their knowledge and loving them anyway.
