Marry Him

by Marina Ford

  Chloe smiles at him.

  “It’s Joe’s exhibition in Dublin. The one I’d arranged for him with my contacts in Ireland? Had a call from Orla, the curator. She said they had to move Joe’s pieces forward.”

  “When?” I ask, pretending to be worried.

  “This weekend.”

  “What, this weekend?”

  “Yes,” Chloe says. “Told them you’d be there.”

  “What? Why did you do that?” I ask, giving Laurence Olivier a run for his money. “I can’t just— I mean, Harry and I have plans. And besides, you should’ve told them to ring me directly.”

  “She tried.” Chloe looks at me pointedly.

  I smack my forehead. Everybody knows that my phone is always discharged or on silent. This is all part of the Plan. One of the little intricate things that Harry will notice later on. Little winks at our foibles. Or my foibles. He has no foibles.

  “Well, can we call her back?” Harry asks, visibly concerned. “Maybe she can move it again.”

  “I don’t think so,” Chloe says. “She sounded very firm on the phone that it had to be this weekend or they’d have to say no to your pieces altogether. They’ve had a scheduling disaster. They’re fully booked for the year otherwise.”

  “You have to go, then,” Harry says to me. “I’ll book your flight and—” He pauses. As I predicted, he remembers that this weekend is our anniversary. “Maybe I could come with you? I could stay out of your way during the day, and then at least we’d have the evening together.”

  I sigh in pretend frustration.

  “I suppose we’ll have to.”

  “Well, I’ll call her to confirm, then,” Chloe chimes in.

  “Do you want to come in?” Harry motions her towards the kitchen. “I’m making duck and roast vegetables.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Chloe says, “but I have to be somewhere.”

  She kisses my cheek, waves at Harry, and then leaves. I make a play of my disappointment: I toss a kitchen towel, despondently, onto the counter, and I pour more wine out for myself, like a man who’s just had a bit of a blow.

  “Hey.” Harry nudges me, amused. “You know, Dublin’s not the worst place to be for romance.”

  I shrug. “I know,” I say, in the tones of a martyr.

  “It’s got castles, culture, and cuisine. Hell, I’m glad we’re going. What else were we going to do? I’d plan an itinerary of activities and you’d take pleasure in keeping me from fulfilling it by putting your hand in my trousers.”

  This does make me smile, because it makes me think of our last anniversary. I’d prevented us from going to a really boring, fancy party by giving him a blowjob in our car.

  “Come on.” He reaches for the plates, sets them on the table. “It’ll be great. We’ll make a thing of it.”

  “I’ll have to work.”

  “Not all the time.”

  “I’ll be away most of the day.”

  “Well, and so what? Hand me the cutlery. We’ll make the evening count.”

  I let him warm me to the idea.

  This is the Plan.

  On Saturday, since the exhibition thing is entirely fictitious, I am going to spend the whole day hiding from him (to maintain the pretence), preparing for the grand evening, while he explores Dublin. Then, in the evening, I am going to take him to dinner at a traditional Irish restaurant. His family is Irish, hence the whole Dublin idea.

  At dinner, I’m going to flirt with him until he tries to drag me back to the hotel room to do dirty things to me. Between the restaurant and the hotel there’s the Ha’penny Bridge, which Google Images assures me is gorgeous at night. I’m going to stop him from dragging me to the hotel by insisting we have a look at it first. We will go on the bridge, look at the river, and then, somehow, if by some miracle my heart doesn’t explode beforehand, I’m going to ask him.

  Even Chloe approves of this idea, because it’s demonstrative without being over the top.

  “That’s the most romantic thing I ever heard,” she says, grudgingly. “Now I kind of hope he’ll say yes, the bastard.”

  I even go so far as to ask Siobhan, because she knows Harry better than anybody, and she’s bound to know if anything in that plan isn’t to Harry’s taste. She bursts into tears.

  “Oh, it’s going to be so beautiful!” she sobs. “I want to be there! Can I be there? Can you at least take a picture of it?”

  “Well, no,” I say. “That—that would defeat the whole purpose of the surprise.”

  The conversation, which we have over the phone, lasts maybe five minutes, of which four and a half are purely snivelling sounds from her, and my manly attempts at soothing her emotions.

  I tell Frank, out of loyalty, as well. His reaction is somewhat different.

  “Two words, pal,” he says furiously. “Prenup agreement.”

  Cynicism sounds harsher in a Scottish accent.

  “I don’t really have a whole lot of money,” I say. “Besides, don’t you think Harry’d find it a little unromantic if I dragged him to a lawyer right after he said yes?”

  “Romantic schmomantic,” Frank insists. “It’s the Wild West, pal, and ye better be a gunslinger or else ye’ll be one of the corpses the gunslingers have to step over.”

  Not, as I said, a particularly helpful perspective.

  So, with my friends and family braced, with the bracelets in my bag, the hotel booked, and a firm plan in my head, Harry and I set off on Friday afternoon for the airport.

  In the cab, Harry is texting, because he had to leave work early to make the flight, and he’s not easily detached from his many responsibilities there.

  “Can you believe it?” he says to me, frowning at his mobile. “Malcolm wants to introduce compulsory morning yoga to the office. He wants to be a yogi.”

  “I’d pay to see that.”

  He smiles to himself, amused, as he continues to text.

  During all the planning, the person I most wished to confide in was Harry himself. For the past four years I haven’t really done anything major without first consulting with him. It feels wrong to have a secret I can’t share with him. In fact, the whole Plan is a set of a thousand little secrets, each one equally painful to keep from him.

  His phone rings in his hand. He freezes, suddenly—I can feel his whole body stiffen.

  “Are you ok?” I say, surprised.

  “Ah, yeah.” He picks up, putting a finger to his free ear and leaning away from me. This is odd. He speaks in a quiet, rushed voice. “Yeah? No, I can’t talk right now . . . Sorry . . . Yes, okay, bye.”

  He hangs up.

  “Who was that?” I ask.

  He looks at me, smiles a perfunctory smile, and shakes his head. “A very intrusive client. Do you have our tickets?”

  “I do. What client?”

  “It would take too long to explain.”

  He puts his phone into his pocket, the one farthest away from me, and then reaches for my hand and smiles at me. “Don’t worry. I won’t let her disturb our romantic weekend. I wouldn’t want us to have to turn around and spend our anniversary in bed.”

  “No, that would be awful,” I agree, remembering to smile.

  “Intolerable.”

  “Ghastly.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do,” he says.

  “You never did,” I confirm.

  He laughs and presses my hand. The cab driver glances in the rearview mirror at us, but Harry cheerfully ignores him. My thoughts wander, between his face, turned to me with a warm smile, the bracelets in my backpack, and the phone in his other pocket.

  Harry’s never been shy about unburdening himself about work before.

  Five Years Before the Big Day

  It had been two weeks since I’d stormed Harry’s castle and come out of it as the jester. Two weeks during which I’d hidden my disappointment well. That is to say, Chloe, Frank, and I were unanimous in our opinion that despite my initial willingness to admit that Harry was not all bad
, it turned out that he was, in fact, the worst.

  If my insistence on reviving the topic whenever possible gave either of my friends a hint that perhaps I cared more than I was willing to admit, they were both kind enough never to tease me about it.

  “Corporate wanker!” Chloe would cheer, wine in hand, whenever we went out and I wanted to go over it again.

  “Bloody scoundrel!” Frank would toast with his pint of ale.

  These were two weeks during which I avoided the agency as much as possible, sending my designs to them by post or dropping them off at the lobby—Harry hadn’t fired me.

  Chloe’s newest work involved sculptures of derrières, and since she’d finished them all at home (making something of a mess involving clay, sculpting powder, and various forms of paint all over our bathroom, kitchen, and sitting room), I had to help her pack them in boxes so she could move them over to her studio.

  “Why butts?” I asked as I lifted a particularly voluptuous example, complete with short, wiry hairs stuck in tufts to the provocatively rounded cheeks.

  Chloe laughed. Her smoker’s voice made the laugh sound particularly lascivious.

  “Love them,” she said. “Can’t help it. There’s so much expression in them. It’s like your second face.”

  “As someone who’s seen his fair share of butts, I beg to disagree,” I said, wrapping the one in my hand in bubble wrap and placing it tightly next to the others in the cardboard box.

  “You’re not looking properly, then,” she told me. “And it’s fascinating, because even though it belongs to you, you probably wouldn’t recognize it if it were shown to you in a photograph or, say, in a sculpture.”

  I stopped mid-motion. “Hang on . . . You didn’t—you didn’t make a sculpture of my butt, did you?”

  She laughed. “Would you know if I had?”

  It’s not implausible. I do walk around naked a lot.

  “Chloe . . .”

  “Relax.” She reached for her pack of cigarettes and lit up. “You know how I feel about consent.”

  Relieved, I continued on with my work.

  “I notice that most of these are men’s butts,” I said. “Personal preference or are men just more eager to moon you?”

  She grinned and wriggled her eyebrows at me. “What happens in this flat when you’re not here is nobody’s business but my own.” Glancing at the clock, she moaned. “Shit, it’s late. Got to go.”

  She kissed my cheek, grabbed her handbag and, before she left the flat, threw over her shoulder, “Be a darling and wrap the rest for me, will you? We’ll drive them over when I get back.” For a few moments, there was nothing but the sound of my laptop playing Nelson Riddle’s “Lisbon Antigua,” (because sugary orchestral music from the 1950s cheers me up) while I continued to wrap fist-sized sculptures of men’s buttocks in bubble wrap—officially the gayest thing I’d ever done.

  There was a knock on the door. I shouted, “It’s open!”

  Maya popped her head in meekly and said, “Joe?”

  There I was in nothing but my boxer shorts with two male butts, one in each hand, listening to the sort of music Disney’s Cinderella used to encourage critters to help her tidy, and all this in the midst of what, even to my eyes, seemed like the sort of place a tornado would leave alone, assuming its job here had already been done. Maya’s eyes travelled around the place with obvious awe.

  “Wow,” she said, stepping in. “Wow.”

  “Er, sorry” was all I could think of responding. “This . . . I have an explanation for this.” I lifted the two butts up.

  Her eyebrows rose high. “I’m not judging.”

  “They’re not mine, they’re . . . Okay, er, come in, have a seat— Wait.” I put the butts away, cleared a chair of old clothes and cut-up magazines, and then rushed to the laptop to turn the music off, before hunting for a shirt to put on.

  “Oh you don’t have to—” she said, watching me run around.

  “No, it’s fine, it’s all right,” I said. “D’you want a drink?”

  “No, thanks,” she said, which wasn’t exactly a surprise considering that all our glasses were, at this point, set out on the kitchen counter, each hosting misty, dark-grey water and soaking a different-sized brush.

  She did sit down, however, and when I turned to her at last, mostly dressed if a little chaotic, she smiled and said, “I haven’t seen you around, so I came to check on you. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, fine, fine,” I said, waving my hand around to show her that I was indeed fine. Crikey, but was my heart beating fast. Had Harry sent her?

  “You cancelled the last meeting,” she noticed, giving me a speaking look.

  “Oh yes, well,” I said, and then turned my gaze away from her searching eyes. I had no right to be disappointed, really. Harry hadn’t made me any promises. I never asked him whether he was single. He never technically lied to me. In any event, this wasn’t a subject I would ever raise with his personal assistant. “I sent you the new prints, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” she said, mildly, and the way she looked from side to side, it was clear that she had some unpleasant news.

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Okay, don’t be cross,” she said. “There’s a small chance that Malcolm might have hired another artist to take over your job.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, he seems to think—”

  “Wait a second. I have a contract.”

  “Yes, but if you look at the fine print, it does say that if your work is rejected by the client, then the agency won’t be held liable,” she said.

  “Why would the client reject me?”

  “If he were given a competing design, for example. Look, I’ve spoken to Harry, and he likes your work, but you need to come to the office and keep his people on your side. You need to convince them that yours is the work they should hype up for the client when the time comes.”

  Bloody Malcolm. I knew nothing good ever came of networking.

  “I’ll pop around next week,” I said, grudgingly. “Is there— Is there a time I could come when Harry wouldn’t be there?”

  I had turned my attention to the butts in the box so I wasn’t looking at her, and it was my intention to sound casual, perhaps humorous, à la You know, Harry and I don’t like each other, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. But she was silent for a few seconds and then, delicately, said, “I think he really wants to see you.”

  “Oh?”

  I continued to focus on the rearranging of the butts in the box.

  “Yeah, he asked about you,” she said. “I don’t think anybody saw you two leave together the other night, but even if they did, they wouldn’t suspect anything, you know. And even if they did, we’re not that kind of office. Everybody loves and trusts Harry, and nobody would think to suggest that you slept your way into your job or anything like that.”

  “What?” I was shocked. It hadn’t occurred to me that, on top of everything else, I would have to endure that sort of speculation.

  “I’m just saying,” Maya smiled. “Harry really likes your work, and that’s all that matters to us.”

  A thousand things sprung to my mind. I wanted to ask her whether this amazing good opinion Harry had earned among his colleagues would be at all impacted by knowing that he was a cheating scumbag. Or whether they caught young artists for him to fuck on purpose. What sort of organisation was this, anyway?

  I didn’t say any of that.

  “I’ll come around next week.”

  Maya beamed at me. “I’ll set up a meeting.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “And I’m sorry I made you come all the way to tell me in person. My phone is habitually discharged.”

  Although I really didn’t want to see Harry again, I did need this gig, and I’d already done too much work to simply give it up for someone Malcolm chose. Especially for someone Malcolm chose. It would have been one thing to have been used as a sex toy by a gorgeous-yet-evil suit, and another t
o have then lost the job.

  I rang Frank.

  “I need your help,” I said, and explained the situation.

  He came over with his laptop, ready to walk me through the intricacies of doing a competent presentation for a corporate client.

  “First,” he said, “you need to know that these fuckers love a good PowerPoint presentation.”

  “Excellent,” I said, eagerly. “How do I get me one of those?”

  With the help of a few pints of beer, he guided me through the process almost painlessly. It wasn’t difficult in and of itself. In fact, interlaced as his tutorial was with salacious stories about his sex adventures with Gabriella, the whole evening was painless enough.

  Her parents didn’t mind her dating Frank, but since she still lived with them, there was the small problem of premarital sex—in that Frank and Gabriella wanted to have it, and her parents thought that it would be neat if instead Frank practiced some prayer-fu. So the way this relationship worked was that Gabriella and Frank violated some commandments in her house, mostly while her parents were away. That’s because Gabriella, like all normal human beings who’d been forbidden something, enjoyed that something all the more for it. And wildly.

  “Sometimes,” he said, leaning in confidingly, “she scares me a little.” The twinkle in his eye didn’t suggest she was anywhere near scaring him off, though.

  “She sounds nuts,” I said.

  “Oh yes.” He laughed. “Nuts like a fox! Have you ever just sort of meshed with someone? You know what I’m talking about? It’s like everything suddenly fits.”

  “It happens. It doesn’t mean anything,” I said, my heart giving a sick leap.

  But Frank was in his own world and barely heard me. Dreamily, he went on, “It isn’t just the sex. Sometimes I feel like I want to burst; I want to do everything, go everywhere, all at once until my head spins. She has a way of looking at me, and suddenly everything inside of me goes calm.”

  I cleared my throat. “Hm, yeah, so how do you put in another slide again?”

  I worked tirelessly for days, and after one last sleepless night of putting all my material into a long and elaborate presentation, I went to my meeting with the P&B Designs team, determined to both win the client and show Harry that I wasn’t to be fucked with (figuratively speaking). I was in battle mode.