Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  “What’s this for?”

  “Open it.”

  She took the cookie out of its crinkly package.

  “Isabelle Conway, will you marry me?”

  She snapped the cookie in two. “‘Now is the time to try something new,’” she read.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  “I hope you’re going to save that fortune forever.”

  Following our engagement, Izzy’s and my having separate residences in the interim was more of a technicality and not that pestering of an impediment. We slept in the same bed each night. Still, we heartily looked forward to the condo closing, the loft apartment we’d soon jointly own, and to moving in together. Even Ishiguro seemed unable to corral his Christmas-morning impatience, his eyes unusually perspicacious and his curly tail unfurled and darting practically every second he wasn’t having his meal or taking a nap.

  We couldn’t wait to get started on the future, and so spent a series of evenings that late fall shopping in Lincoln Park. We began, modestly enough, with the intention of buying a TV. The set at Izzy’s belonged to Chris, and my ancient tube had outlived its usefulness. Izzy planned to relegate it and my bachelor pad–green IKEA pullout, book boxes, and record crates to the second bedroom (office, storage “garage,” guest room). She was also ready to replace her heavy, battered thrift-store dresser, cocoa-colored queen-size headboard, matching bed frame, mattress, and box-spring. A lot more work lay ahead of us.

  In each furniture store and housewares boutique we visited up and down Halsted and across Armitage, Izzy sought and appraised and juxtaposed while I nodded and tried not to think too much about the rising ache in my back and rumble in my stomach. I was innately bored by shopping and fearful of the tab, which seemed to increase exponentially like the national debt clock sign near Times Square with each second we were held consumer captives. Our final stop, Ethan Allen, was the most customer-labor intensive. Like a good fiancé, I remained present before the color swatches and floor sample wood and silver and glass and Oriental rug. I was intent on bearing sangfroid throughout this. I could fake it until dinner. We strode the floors, following our designer. She wasn’t terribly concerned with sublimating her indisposition for buyers’ uncertainty or the fact she was working on commission. Izzy hastily selected major items that would be ready for delivery in eight to twelve weeks. Why couldn’t the designer have just said two months, I wondered. By the end, Izzy had maxed out a credit card for our new bed and tables and lamps and wall hangings. She handled and returned a Torah’s worth of computer-printed scrolls requiring almost as many signatures as our mortgage application itself.

  And before long, it was January. We closed on the place on a Wednesday morning and celebrated with pizza and Prosecco in a neighborhood trattoria afterward. Barely a week later, a moving truck made a stop in front of my Humboldt Park sublet and another at Izzy’s building. Then it delivered the boxes of things we’d accumulated separately, which from here on out would be our mutual possessions, to the new place, followed closely behind by a large, gray delivery rig from a remote warehouse. I’d always remember, as we purchased and packed and pared, sending our quiescent particles into motion, how blissfully unaware I was during those joyful, auspicious days of what life was to decant next.

  6

  The morning after Valentine’s Day, Izzy, in a simple black evening gown, and I, in my event suit, went before a judge at City Hall to repeat-after-me and say-I-do. Chris, our solely attending “best man of honor,” stood behind us in a tag-concealed Brioni tux he planned to return to Neiman Marcus before work that afternoon. Izzy had to slip Chris’s silver Superman ring onto my finger during the ceremonial exchange since he’d let me leave the apartment without the wedding band she bought me at a jewelry store in Chinatown the night I proposed. I smiled at her through the short round of clapping that followed the kissing of the bride and groom. The jubilance the collective hands of the registrar, the judge, the bailiff, Chris, and the two or three random people in the courtroom generated was unexpectedly touching. With the documents signed, we were ready to go to lunch. Izzy chose a trattoria that was a short walk from 121 North LaSalle. It had so-so food, she told us, but plenty of cheap, bubbly Prosecco. It sounded perfect for our budget that, since buying real estate, couldn’t as comfortably accommodate Champagne.

  Bea Corton joined us at the trattoria. Bea was the sommelier at Osteria Via Stato and Izzy’s first friend in the city. I’d met her on one of our earliest dates. For our celebration, or for her upcoming shift on the restaurant floor, Bea was dressed impeccably. She wore a black-gray Chanel suit and matching patent leather Mary Janes. Her dark hair was blow-dried and styled. It bore the glossy sheen of fresh meringue, just like Izzy’s, but was trimmed several inches shorter. They saw the same stylist, Ingrid. Bea presented me a small, rectangular Tiffany box.

  “You didn’t have to get me anything,” I said, tugging on the shimmery ribbon.

  Her gift was a waiter’s corkscrew—a wine key—with a handle that matched the color of its packaging. Izzy had taught me how to use the industry-standard opener, and I could now finally retire my old rabbit ears. “Something borrowed, something blue?” I asked.

  “You’ll need one of these now,” she said.

  The trattoria’s general manager was so amused to have guests who’d just gotten married that he didn’t seem to detect that Isabelle Conway was not just one of the party, but the bride. He bought us a bottle of Piper Heidsieck, which a server shortly brought out and poured. Once the fury of fizz atop the amber-tinged Champagne in the flutes around the table subsided, I held my glass aloft and drew it to Izzy’s. “To you,” I said.

  We clinked, sipped, and then kissed. “This is much better than a wedding,” she said.

  I looked at the portion of the upended red label that extended beyond the rim of the ice bucket. “Much better.” I took another sip and swished the contents around my mouth. “It’s toasty,” I said. “I’m getting it! The toast!”

  She smiled. “It comes from the oak barrels the wine aged in.”

  I was almost too stunned to speak. I sipped again and confirmed the slightly charred buttery brioche. “I mean, I’ve gotten some of the other things: the weight of wines, two percent milk, whole milk, acid . . . usually after you point them out. I think this is the first time I’ve really picked up something in a wine. Like I can really taste the toast.”

  “I’m proud of you. My sommelier protégé is learning.” She chuckled. “I can always tell you’ve gotten acid after you’ve had too much Pinot Noir and cheese and spend most of the night hurling.”

  “Right,” I said, and forced a small grin. I tried not to recollect spending an evening, after a tasting event Izzy did for Harris Private Bank, sleeping on the bathroom floor at the intervals I wasn’t deploying the contents of my fractious stomach. I stared into my glass. It was remarkable. “Toast.”

  She raised her flute. “To us.”

  When we got back to the apartment, Izzy kicked off her shoes and repaired down the hall to the bedroom to dislodge herself from her makeshift wedding dress. I watched my bride—my wife—through the eyes of the newly contextualized.

  It was strange being home at this hour. With our neighbors away, at work, shopping at Costco, off on camping trips, it was almost as though nobody else resided at the Biscuit Lofts but Izzy and me, and the pug I now officially co-parented. The most pleasing absence was that of the equanimity terrorist Laheys and their volatile three-year-old son from upstairs. Scott and Sheryl had been disingenuous nuisances from their first official visit to introduce themselves five weeks ago, all fake smiles and triteness and self-consciously manicured hair. They claimed to welcome us to the factory, but were quite transparently there to poke around. Scott had a franchise insurance agency in Tri-Taylor and began to hawk off-brand homeowner’s policies within sentences. Sheryl tried to cadge dis
tributors’ samples of cheap Pinot Grigio before the movers had even finished unloading the truck. We could tell right away they were a supremely odd couple. Sheryl was older, Scott wore toe rings. In front of us, they feigned affection for each other, but at home, amid the toys and extension cords and family portraiture, they argued, violently and often. Cassidy ran up and down their uncarpeted floors when they fought, and also when they didn’t.

  After she was free from her binding garments and had changed into a T-shirt and some sweatpants, Izzy arranged herself comfortably on the couch. She dug the remote control out from the small of her back and commenced a survey of the afternoon television options. Ishiguro came over, stretched, yawned, and then resituated himself atop her rose colored–cotton legs.

  I began sending text messages reporting the news of our getting hitched, to old grad school girlfriends (“You’re so cool, Hapworth,” Jessie fired back); to Ari Marks, a former student who was now a local journalist; to my campus sub for the afternoon, Berkal. I left voice mails at my mother’s office, telegraphic haiku with my father’s and sister’s answering services.

  “I should probably tell Dominique,” Izzy said, though she didn’t sound very eager to enact the plan. She was petting the snoozing dog and glancing at the television with little interest. She seemed perfectly content doing nothing more than basking in the afternoon’s tranquillity. Izzy’s bistro absence must have infuriated the tyrannical chef, though he’d begrudgingly granted permission. I was glad she’d taken the entire day off. These rare hours of freedom she had from commotion and disturbance were precisely what Izzy needed to detoxify from her celebrity and its attendant annoyances, to reconcile accounts, to be able to gird herself for future trials.

  I was standing at the breakfast bar. I freed my shirttails from my suit pants and stared at my reflection in the darkened screen of the new MacBook Izzy had bought me. My phone buzzed while I was loosening my tie. I discerned from the Caller ID that it was Ari Marks. I answered and sat down on a barstool.

  “Congratulations, Professor.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I looked over at Izzy again. “I can’t believe we actually did it.”

  “Let me read you your wedding present.” It was a draft of a short article about Izzy that he’d just submitted to make the deadline for next week’s Daley Machine issue. I was touched by my old student’s abiding reverence for the teacher he’d so patently eclipsed. My mouth opened involuntarily, in the overdramatic manner of a seventies sitcom character, at some of the more tumescent bits.

  “I can’t believe you called me a restaurateur,” I whined with mock exasperation.

  “They don’t fact-check,” Ari said. “And besides, I didn’t say you worked in Chicago.”

  “You said ‘acclaimed.’”

  “Oh, who cares? You got married. Married. To Isabelle Conway, a prominent Chicagoan. That makes you prominent by association.”

  “So we have a prommon-law marriage?”

  I hung up my suit and changed into a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt. Beside Izzy I fell asleep. I dreamt I was sitting courtside at a Bulls game, more concerned with the hot dog and its yet-to-be boiled marketing potential than I was with the play, but attuned to the sounds nonetheless. I woke up, returned to the couch in my post-wedding real life. The game noise had followed me out of the dream and morphed. Scott and Sheryl were embroiled in a fight that now rained down from the invisible rafters. I got the gist of the conflict when Sheryl screamed, “Go back to your fucking slut, you bastard! I’m gonna find a man who knows how to fuck me!” Meanwhile, Cassidy, to whom his parents were oblivious, cried away in his room. The new false drywall ceiling we’d installed was supposed to muffle the Laheys, but their melodrama came at nearly as ferocious a pitch as ever.

  Izzy was shaking a cocktail in the kitchen. She glared at me when I sat up. “I still think he’s gay,” she said, pointing at the ceiling.

  I shook my head. At least she was being somewhat lighthearted about it. “Do you want to go somewhere? Have a drink somewhere?”

  “We can’t go out every time they start up.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose we can.”

  Despite the unlikelihood of our ever doing anything to make living below the Laheys tolerable, we’d tried to implement a variety of approaches. We went upstairs to talk. At first we approached with sympathy, open to discussion. Nothing changed. We began to emerge from the discussions astonished, embarrassed. Often Izzy was crying by the time we returned to the apartment. Our sentiments turned vengeful and fulminating. “That kid’s an asshole,” she shouted over our heads, following one scathing negotiation regarding the toddler’s incessant—and incessantly reverberant—toddling. “A Casshole,” I returned. Many nights Izzy stayed up with the computer for hours after Ishiguro and I had passed out. She read document after document, website message board after message board, Googled phrase after phrase that she thought could offer some insight, a way out of this suffocating mess. A single promising lead emerged: to have a ceiling installed. It was a messy and expensive proposition, but the pulverized newspaper insulation blasted into it supposedly absorbed all echoing sound. Twenty thousand dollars and a dozen vacuumings later, we could still hear everything just as before. The only thing left to do was to resign ourselves to the fact that this living situation wasn’t going to be everything we’d dreamed it would be. We had to get used to the unplanned cohabitation. You make do, I could hear my grandmother saying in her Jersey accent. But for Izzy, it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  She grabbed her martini from the counter. The vodka spiraled up in a splash, but managed to catch itself. I marched behind her down the long hall. Once inside our bedroom, I observed what looked to be a disaster site, a small village that had been ravaged by war, an island decimated by nuclear explosion, a West Side women’s clothing store that had been looted after the second Bulls championship in Rodney King–besmirched 1992. Izzy’s dresses lay on the floor, pantsuits on the unmade bed. Over the back of a chair were a number of T-shirts. Cashmere sweaters, inside out, practically balled up, were strewn about. The disarray kicked a faction in my brain to which I hadn’t been yet introduced that mandated a degree of order in our life into high alert mode.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond to my question. Instead she announced, “We’ll just sit in here. If they’re going to be down there, we can hide here.”

  This didn’t sound like a very promising plan. “Izzy, there’s no TV here. What are we going to do? Listen to the radio?”

  “Read,” she said. “You can read.”

  “You’re not being very reasonable. It’s our wedding day. Is this the honeymoon you envisioned? Marooned in a bedroom?”

  She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she took another sip of vodka from her sweaty glass.

  “Okay. Let’s go get a drink,” she finally said.

  I realized I was standing on the black evening dress Izzy wore at the City Hall courtroom this morning. “What about this?” I asked.

  “What about what?” she replied testily.

  I knew from women’s cable TV that some brides shipped their wedding costumes off to the garment taxidermists long before the Donna Summer song at the end of the reception. Most probably at least zipped theirs back up in plastic bags and hung them in their closets. And here Izzy had abandoned hers like some kind of hospital gown.

  “This,” I said. “Your dress is under my foot.”

  “Well,” she said, “then address it.”

  I picked the lifeless exoskeleton up and stood there, stupefied.

  “What?” she asked. “Do you know how much that fucking false ceiling cost?”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”

  She reached for the dress. She took it from me so forcefully I feared it might end up in two pieces. We’d been so happy this mor
ning, taking our vows before the judge, at the trattoria afterward. Now we were being practically chased out of our home by some loud morons upstairs. Did Izzy really want to spend the rest of our lives locked in a constant battle, like they were?

  Several hours and many drinks later, I pretended to sleep as Izzy gathered the dog from the corner of the bed. I listened to her pad down the hall. I supposed she was headed to stow Ishiguro for the night in his crate in the spare room. As I expected, she came back alone. The Pottery Barn Melrose Place drama on the third floor had abated while we were emborrachandonos con margaritas at Mamacita’s. At long last, the building stood in utter silence. Regrettably, the opposite was the case on the set of my internal soap opera. Something about the afternoon weighed on my mind. And it wasn’t just the aftershock of the fighting upstairs that continued to rankle. My eyes were still shut when I felt Izzy climbing on top of me.

  “Izzy,” I said.

  “What,” she whined. The word, slippery with tequila, fell from her mouth and landed, palpably, on my cheek. “We don’t need to bother with condoms anymore.”

  “That’s not exactly—I just . . . I can’t . . .”

  There was nothing going on between my legs. It was as though I didn’t have a dick. I imagined myself a longhaired paraplegic Ron Kovic, railing against my malfunctioning equipment before a frightened hooker in Born on the Fourth of July. Emotion had never gotten in the way of erection before. I was astonished, and not astonished, that this had happened to me, on my wedding night, of all nights. For the last twenty years, save the occasional performance anxiety that one-night stands and recreational drug use used to sometimes engender, I could always count on one invariable: I could fuck whenever, wherever: grimy food court unisex bathrooms, the backseats of compact cars, cabana showers. For twenty years, my cock had stood at perpetual attention, stoic, compliant, dimly guileless, smiling dumbly, yet capable, in theory, of wreaking great havoc, like an armed and overweight bank branch rent-a-cop. I had always been, even in the face of adversity, virile.