by Marina Ford
He then shifted in his chair, turned to me, and said, “I’ve got a call to get to. Mr. Kaminski?”
I followed him to the door, half-expecting to be told never to come back. He was texting as we walked down the corridor together, and didn’t say anything.
“So,” I said, feeling a little awkward following him around like that, “do you want me to make any changes?”
“Yes,” he said, impatiently. I’d never seen anybody text so quickly and so angrily.
“Which of the comments—” I began, and his head snapped up, suddenly, as if remembering I was there.
“I’ve got a meeting,” he said. “My colleagues have explained to you what we want, I expect you’ll know what to do.”
This last he said like an accusation. As though, if I couldn’t make out the contradictory mess of non-instructions his colleagues discussed in the conference room, it would mark me as a poor artist.
“I’m not clairvoyant,” I said, a little defensively.
“Clearly,” he muttered. His phone buzzed in his hand and he frowned down at it. Without lifting his head, he said, “Maya will help you set up another meeting. Next week, no later.”
He was texting again, frown lines deepening with every thumb tap. Then he hit Send, finally looked up, and dryly added, “I hope your grandmother recovers well.”
Maya was not a convincing liar, apparently. He turned into his office without shaking my hand or even saying goodbye.
I hated, hated, hated the guy.
Six Months Before the Big Day
Things to avoid when telling your parent you plan to get engaged:
Don’t tell your mother while she’s holding a hot beverage in her hands and her poodles are crowding around her feet.
When you tell your mother while she’s holding a hot beverage and her poodles are crowding around her feet, don’t try to kick the poodles away, hoping to rescue your mother from getting burned by hot beverage.
While your mother is screaming in shock and agony, don’t take it personally when she calls you a bumbling idiot.
Don’t then tell her, dramatically, “Fine! No grandchildren!”
When you do upset her, don’t then compound the problem by begging her forgiveness, promising her a small country worth of grandchildren, when you haven’t discussed children with your SO at all.
My mother is the first person I decide to tell. There are many reasons for that, the main one being that my former flatmate and one of my closest friends, Chloe, doesn’t like Harry, and my best friend, Frank, is going through a rough separation. It seems sort of appropriate, anyway, to tell one’s parent first.
The reason I decide to confide in someone, instead of just popping the question, is that I’m equal parts scared and excited about this, and I need someone to get excited with me, to make it more parts excited than scared, so that I have the courage to actually go through with it.
“Are you serious?” my mother asks, when at last she sits, putting her tea on a coaster and telling her dogs to calm down.
“I think so.”
“Well, do you think so or are you sure?” she asks. “There’s no if-ing and but-ing in marriage.”
“I hope there’s butt-ing in my marriage,” I murmur. She slaps my hand and tells me to be serious.
“Okay, I am serious,” I say. “I do want to marry him. What do you think?”
She sighs heavily.
“I never thought about it.” She sips at her tea. “I never thought you’d get married at all, after— Well, you know.”
It’s not something we ever discuss—a situation in which actions have always spoken louder than words—and so I put my hand on hers and say, “You don’t hate the idea, do you?”
I really want to get married, but I couldn’t do it without her on board. Not after all she’s done for me. I don’t even mean just the fact that she adopted me (contrary to the wishes and advice of all her friends and family). Not to brag, but she alienated her entire community and divorced her husband for me. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses at the time when it became clear that I would never live up to the standards of the religion. You can’t be a gay Jehovah’s Witness. At least, you can, and some probably are, but in our case our elders strongly believed you shouldn’t be, and when everybody found out, we were shunned (we call it D-ed, meaning disfellowshipped).
“I don’t hate the idea,” she says, turning her hand in mine and pressing back. “You know I love Harry.”
When I brought him home (and it was the first time I’d ever brought a bloke home to introduce to her), she was in love with him almost from the moment he stretched out his hand, smiled, and said, “Nice to meet you.”
Harry is the sort of guy all parents hope their children might bring home one day.
“Joe,” she says earnestly, “marriage is a very serious thing. It changes everything, you understand? Your relationship with Harry, your relationship with yourself, everything. And you’re not the most—how do I put it?—you’re not the most together person there is. You have a way of throwing yourself at things . . . recklessly. I want you to think deeply about this. Is this really what you want?”
“Yes,” I say, without skipping a beat. “I want to be with him forever.”
That makes her smile, which makes me sigh in relief, because her gravity was starting to get to me.
“Well—” she sips at her tea “—I can’t blame you.”
I roll my eyes. For some reason, Harry is very popular with women.
“Do I ask for your blessing or something?” I ask.
“I suppose if you want to be traditional about it, you’d have to ask his father for permission,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye. Then she bites her lip and, repressing a laugh, adds, “Maybe you can make him cry again?”
I sink my face into my hands. “Don’t remind me.”
“Maybe this time don’t wear a skirt. That might help.”
“It wasn’t like that! It was a—”
“I liked it. I’d kill for legs like that.”
This was when Harry first introduced me to his parents. In fairness, I could have chosen a different time to pioneer skirts for men. And I could have, come to think of it, not made things worse by arguing forcibly that Harry’s dad should wear them too, armed with a bunch of information about testicular health.
Harry’s dad is a “traditional” man. This makes it funnier for my mum that, as legend has it, I am the reason Harry’s old man cried for the first time in his life.
“Well, don’t despair,” she says, laughing. “He accepted that ex-boyfriend of Harry’s once. He’ll come around to you too, eventually.”
I groan. “I don’t think I can de-evolve fast enough for that to happen!”
She chuckles. “You’re pretty charming when you try to be, Joe. Don’t underestimate that.”
“I think I’ll go ahead and skip the ‘ask the father of the bride for permission’ bit anyway, thank you.”
“So.” She leans back from me again. Her glasses have patches of steam on them from her tea, but I can see her big, blue eyes looking at me with concern from behind their thick lenses. “Sort of sudden, isn’t it?”
“We’ve been together over four years. What do you mean ‘sudden’?”
“I didn’t mean I expected you not to stay together, but . . . to be frank, I didn’t think you’d do so conventional a thing. Not like you.”
I ruminate over this. It is terribly conventional. Perhaps this is what she meant earlier, when she said she never thought I’d get married at all. After all we’ve been through together, throwing off the shackles of an oppressive religion, why would I bend to tradition now?
“I think . . . I think Harry would like it,” I say. Watching Harry eat breakfast, or brush his teeth or sort his ties, or frown over his iPad, reading the news—it came to me recently that I’d be devastated if that ended one day. And once in a while a mate of mine would describe some girl he’s been seeing for a few weeks as my girlfri
end, and I thought how strange it was for me to use the words my boyfriend to describe Harry. The terms are the same, and yet the realities are so different. Harry and I live together. I can’t get a good night’s sleep if he isn’t in bed next to me. There are whole TV shows I have never seen because Harry doesn’t have time to watch them, and it would be sacrilege for me to watch them without him. Harry and Joe is one of those sets of words that just go together, like bread and butter or rock and roll or Adam and Steve.
“And I think it’s time,” I tell my mother, saying but a small part of the whole truth.
Chloe, my former flatmate, a fellow artist, an activist, and a bullshit detector now in her late sixties, is not pleased when I eventually do tell her. She didn’t like Harry at the beginning, and while she accepts that we are together (“For now,” she says), she holds as an absolute truth that people are better off outside of stable relationships.
“Marriage is nothing but patriarchal horseshit,” she tells me. “It’s a device used by men to subjugate and enslave womankind.”
“We’re two men,” I say. “It doesn’t apply.”
“Oh but doesn’t it?” She rolls a furious eye at me. “Let me tell you something: equal rights are all well and good, and I will fight for them to the death, you know I will, but you gays are well out of matrimony, mark my words. Why tie yourself to someone legally for eternity? Why, but to prevent someone from leaving, no matter how royally shitty a bastard you become? Eh? Answer me that!”
I can’t answer her, not because I share her opinion, but because she’s spent decades debating in various political and social organisations, including feminist, atheist, and socialist groups, for the rights of women, labourers, homosexuals, transgender people, and various other causes, and has therefore got a counterargument for anything. Arguing with her is like playing tennis with one of those machines that spits balls at you. You might become a better arguer, but you won’t win.
“Let me tell you about Henry VIII—” she continues.
I interrupt her by grabbing her arms, looking her in the eyes, and saying, “Don’t. It’s no use. I’m going to do it.”
She stares at me.
“I’m going to go on one knee . . . or, no, I won’t do that, that’s tacky, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll just do it over dinner . . . No. No, it’s got to be something special. Either way, I will do it. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but by God I will do it!”
Her expression is sour as I make my declaration.
“Your funeral,” she says darkly.
Neither does Frank receive the news with any degree of pleasure. Granted, I could have found him at a better time. He just finished moving into his mother’s attic room, living like, he claims, Bertha bloody Rochester, after Gabriella left him.
“Have ye learned nothing, man!” he demands of me. “Are ye looking on at what is happening to me, and thinking to yourself ‘I want that’? What is wrong with you? Don’t do it! Don’t! Do! It!”
With this lack of enthusiasm from my friends and family, I am reluctant to let anyone else in on it, lest they make me lose my courage altogether.
In the end, I involve one more person. I ask Siobhan, Harry’s twin sister, to come with me to the workshop of a friend of mine to pick up the engagement bracelets I designed and ordered to propose to Harry with. At first, I don’t tell her what they’re really for, and say they’re for our anniversary. But it doesn’t take me long to crack.
We sit together in my friend Freya’s living room while she finishes up with another client in her workroom. Siobhan swipes through her phone looking for a new hair style.
She eyes a pixie cut with a mixture of curiosity and dismay.
“How moon-faced am I? On a scale from one to moon?” she asks.
“You have a lovely face, darling,” I say, “but that would look like arse on you. That Katie Holmes one, though . . .”
“Yes!” She beams, delighted. “Do you think I should change colour? I was thinking ginger, but I don’t know. Ollie says redheads are hot.”
She shows me various shades of red hair dye so we can determine which would look best on her. I honestly want to keep the engagement from her, but the way she speaks to me, the angle at which she holds her head, something about the way she smiles at me, the shape of her eyes maybe, something, so reminds me of Harry that I blurt it out.
She says, “. . . and this one is Christina Hendricks-red, which would make me look awfully pale, don’t you think?”
I nod. “I want to marry your brother.”
She startles. Her eyes go wide. “What?”
“I want to marry your brother,” I repeat, my heart hammering in my chest. I love Siobhan, and if she’s against this, if she piles on with a list of reasons why I’m being stupid, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go through with it.
“Oh!” she says, blinking rapidly. “Do you mean it?”
That’s when Freya comes in to present me with the two bracelets each in a separate box. Siobhan’s blinking stops, and tears spill out.
“The— Is that— Do you mean— Oh my God!” she whimpers.
The bracelets are exactly what I wanted. Braided leather straps with a silver clasp, and on the clasp the letters J and H intertwined.
“This is so beautiful!” Tears are pouring liberally down her cheeks. “Harry is going to love it!” She throws her arms around my neck and hugs me, hard. “It’s going to be so beau-u-u-utifu-u-ul!”
“Thank you,” I whisper. Freya, sensing a personal moment, smiles and leaves us.
Five Years Before the Big Day
For a while, I wasn’t invited to present in the conference room again—a move I chose not to interpret as a verdict on my first performance there—but instead handed my work in to Harry directly. Usually this meant that I visited Maya’s office, dropped new prints off at her desk, and spent a half hour or so chatting with her over coffee. Once in a while Harry burst in, demanding irritably whether or not Mr. This-And-That had called or whether or not some email had arrived. When he saw me, his reaction was usually frosty but polite, mostly verging on the sarcastic.
“Ah, Mr. Kaminski,” he said, dryly, “how’s your grandmother? All better, I hope?”
“Oh yes,” I said, ignoring his tone. “Not a pleasant thing, hurting your hip at that age.”
“And what age is that?”
I don’t have a grandmother. I didn’t know what ages they naturally come in.
“Ninety-four,” I lied bravely.
“Ninety-four,” he said, suppressing a smile.
“Yes. Ninety-four,” I enunciated. When lying, always stick to your story.
“She must have been very fertile into a very old age to have a grandson your age.”
“Well . . . you know what they say about her generation.”
“No, what?” he asked.
“They—they were very fertile into an old age.”
“I never heard that said of them,” he said, and then smiled at Maya. “One learns something new every day.”
Maya maintained her gravity with difficulty.
“So that’s quite an age to hurt her hip and recover so quickly,” Harry went on. He’d seemed in a hurry before, but now leaned with his elbow against the counter of Maya’s desk, content to dig deeper into the matter. “But if she’s all better—and thank God for small miracles—then what is the reason, I wonder, for you being late today?”
“Am I late?” I asked, innocently. “I’m sure I arrived on time. Didn’t I?”
Maya nodded and lied solemnly, “He arrived an hour ago. We just got to chatting.”
“Must be nice to have so much time to spare,” Harry said to both of us, a slight humorous glint in his eye, and then left.
Once he was gone, I said to Maya, “I don’t know how you put up with him. If I had to work for that wanker, I’d put a bullet through my head.”
She laughed and shook her head. It was true, though, that despite being an enormous dickhead, the
people in his office seemed to like him. Maya seemed fond of him. His employees greeted him cheerfully. They even, to my surprise, celebrated his birthday with a party in the pub across the street from their building. I knew this, because Maya invited me to come along. I wanted to refuse, for obvious reasons, but she insisted.
“Be my ‘date,’” she said, putting date in air quotes. “It’ll be so much fun, I promise.”
“Not my style,” I said. “Although it makes sense that he wants to celebrate the day some coven spawned him from the entrails of dead birds in the circle of people whose wages he pays.”
She laughed and made me promise to think about it.
“Of course ye should go!” Frank told me over the phone, when I asked him. He sounded tired. “It’s called networking. By the way”—here he lowered his voice and sounded at once proud and amused—“I’m at Gabriella’s right now. Her father is an I-shit-ye-not vicar. He doesn’t know I’m in the house. I have to sneak out of here like a fuckin’ Shakespeare character.”
“What? Where is she?”
“Went to work. Just left me here,” he said, laughing. “I’m telling you, she’s one in a million.”
Yeah, like Charlie Manson was one in a million.
I investigated my wardrobe for clothes appropriate for a networking event, but found that I had no idea what networking was and how one was supposed to appear when attending the process. In the end it didn’t matter, because when the day of the party arrived I completely forgot about it, and was, in fact, in the middle of painting when Maya rang and asked me where I was.
Then I had to quickly shower (and let me tell you, quickly showering is not an option when you’re covered in oil paint) while Chloe, instead of helping me, critiqued my work.
“Derivative,” she said, examining the painting through her glasses, while I rushed around searching for a clean-ish shirt.