Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

  One of the last days of camp, it rained. The children stayed inside, doing crafts and memorizing poems. Oliver was assigned the part of Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” about workers harmonizing at the end of a long day. I lay on the cot of my nurse’s station and read a book. Every once in a while, one of the older students would show up and ask me to listen to them recite pieces of “Hiawatha,” but for most of the morning I just lay there eating graham crackers and thinking about my double life. On this rainy August day, I had my very own house and family with Neal, and yet I was also an explorer’s great-great-great granddaughter and a nurse, with a secret lover named Billy England. And when the school day ended, I could go home to both of them.

  TOAST 4

  The Truth About Soul Mates

  Love is something ideal, marrying is something real, and no one ever confuses the ideal with the real without being punished for it.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1823

  IN 1997, soon after Nick and I moved to Austin, Texas, I got a job as a printer at a dating-service photo lab. Along with a few other twentysomethings perhaps not living their best lives, I printed profile pictures of men and women who were seeking love and fulfillment via a national dating service. Everything was done by mail. Film came in each morning; prints went out each night. On breaks, we sat out back by a sad cactus, smoking and drinking lukewarm coffee.

  At our machines, we printed roll after roll of film, making fun of the people in the pictures looking for love in San Diego and Denver. On one wall of the lab, my bookish colleague Richard and I would tape up our favorites, creating a celebrity look-alike section. In Sharpies on these photos we wrote, “Old Keanu” or “That Lady from Who’s the Boss?” The categories with the most images were “Janet Reno” and “Magnum P.I.” We made decks of cards out of the proofs and played a twisted version of Memory with them after hours.

  Another co-worker, Stephen, and I especially enjoyed the photos of people that appeared in October. Why they thought it was appropriate to show up to their photo shoots wearing Halloween garb we never knew, but we were grateful. We printed hundreds of copies of one frumpy, gray-haired woman who had chosen two portraits of herself in cat makeup for her profile. In one, she was smiling; in the other, frowning. We called these photos Happy Kitty and Grumpy Kitty, and we hid them all over the lab. If I went to make a cup of coffee, I would find that the filters had been replaced by a stack of Grumpy Kitties. If Stephen reached for a book of negatives on an upper shelf, Happy Kitties showered onto his head.

  An obstacle to our delight in these games was our boss, Peter, a perpetually annoyed, joy-killing Huskers fan who not only made us take down our celebrity wall and turn down our music (usually the Replacements) but who even made us compete at games like ring toss and golf putting for Christmas bonuses. We wouldn’t have minded, except that the receptionist, who had otherwise distinguished herself only by calling in sick from grief when Chris Farley died, surprised us all by exhibiting the focus of a ninja master. She annihilated us in every game, clearing a small fortune and leaving the rest of us with barely enough to let us get drunk on Shiner Bock after work.

  Then, out of nowhere, Peter died. We heard he was driving when he had a heart attack and crashed. At the funeral, we sat in a back row of the newly built church while a preacher who seemed to be just out of seminary described a man who bore no resemblance to the man we’d worked for.

  “Peter was generous, and kind, and loving,” he said, causing us to elbow one another. One of his friends said, “Peter and I used to go out on his boat. I don’t know whose boat I’m going to go out on now.” He looked searchingly around the room.

  In an unintentional boat segue, the preacher said that Peter’s fiancée wanted everyone to listen to “their song.” On the loudspeaker, the silence was broken by “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. With characteristic viciousness, one co-worker joked that this signaled that the fiancée would be on the rebound at the reception—a cocktail hour, by the way, with a cash bar.

  Everything about that workplace was unromantic, ungenerous, and unloving. We made fun of the people in the pictures for being desperate, but we were desperate, too. After splitting up with Nick, I went on a tear, careening between an exhilarating awareness of my reawakened sexual power and a deep sense of injustice because those I wanted most were too aloof, and those who wanted me most were too present.

  Stephen frequently described to me his sordid exploits with strangers. Richard had sworn off love and sex altogether and turned his apartment into a Spartan den of chore lists. We were deeply flawed, unhappy people with lousy love lives.

  Never was that clearer than on days when we were charged with printing photos for “success stories.” People who met through the dating service and fell in love were invited to sit for a package of pictures of them together, cuddling and staring into each other’s eyes. Looking into our negative carriers at those happy Janet Renos and Magnum P.I.s, seeing how they had looked for and found their soul mates, we knew the joke was really on us.

  THE BEST WEDDING TOAST I’ve ever heard was delivered by my cousin Rhoades, who’s a few years older than me, at his brother’s wedding. It was about the statistical impossibility of soul mates. He calculated the odds of ever finding the one person “meant for you,” given the billions of people on the planet, the number of people you’re likely to meet in the course of your life, and the fact that in the scheme of human history, none of us stays in a corporeal body for very long. If soul mates are real, statistically speaking you would have to live many thousands of lifetimes without love. Rhoades concluded by saying, “So I think the odds are against your being soul mates, but that doesn’t make it less of a miracle that you found each other.”

  J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, did not live a fantastical life. Orphaned as a child and raised by a local priest, he embraced tradition and academia. He fell in love with a young woman named Edith when they were teenagers, married her as soon as he came of age, supported her and their children in the suburbs as a professor, and remained by her side until she died, at the age of eighty-two.

  “Ronald [as he was known] would have to tolerate Edith’s absorption in the daily details of life, trivial as they might seem to him,” said a biographer. “She would have to make an effort to understand his preoccupation with his books and languages, selfish as it might appear to her.”

  “Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgment concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married,” Tolkien wrote in a letter to his son. “Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.”

  My cousin Jeremy believed in soul mates. He was two years older than me, and my opposite in almost every way. I lived in the city; he lived in the country. I was shy; he was outgoing. I had blond hair; he had brown. I was a good girl; he was a rascal. Growing up, he was the closest thing I had to a brother.

  During holidays and summers, we played hide-and-seek, had bottle-rocket fights, and picked leeches off our bodies after swimming. We shared a tree house. We shot skeet in a field. As kids, we watched The Incredible Hulk. As tweens, we tried to unscramble the satellite so we could make believe we were viewing a blurry Playboy channel. We played the McDonald’s Monopoly sweepstakes like it was our job. We recorded a “radio show” on a cassette player—“This is Twins Radio, coming at you from . . . upstairs!”—that featured dreadful Ronald Reagan and Rambo jokes we’d cribbed from Mad magazine.

  We attended freezing early-morning swim classes together, to which his big sister grudgingly chauffeured us while blasting Madonna’s “Holiday.” We took baths together until we were too old to take baths together. When we were teenagers, we got in his car, a wrecked-
up Pinto that eventually caught fire, and drove out to remote fields, where we drank warm beer around campfires. And when I was fifteen, I fell in love with one of his friends.

  Steve was nineteen. When I looked at him, it was like being caught in a tractor beam. He wore an engineer’s cap and had sleepy eyes and John Lennon glasses, and if he had asked me to drop out of high school, marry him, and live in a trailer in the woods, I would not have hesitated for one second.

  When I left the living room of some random underfurnished house in which my cousin’s friends and I were sitting around smoking too many cigarettes, Steve would come find me. We made out in barns, in hallways, and in his cool old car. We never went further because I was inexperienced and he was considerate, and, looking back, he also probably was not that serious about me, whereas I had never felt so sure of anything in my whole life.

  On a road trip in college, Nick and I stopped in to stay with Jeremy in Arizona and found a note saying he was sorry, that he’d left for his own road trip that morning with a woman he’d just met who was his soul mate.

  Even though his roommates let me and Nick crash on the kitchen floor, I was mad that Jeremy had bailed on our plans. Here we were suddenly with this group of New Agey southwestern hippies who left all the doors and windows open and who thought it was hilarious and not terrifying when a large, be-fanged, bristly-haired wild beast—as it turned out, an animal called a javelina—wandered into the house in the middle of the night. I was further annoyed because Jeremy’s relationship with his soul mate didn’t survive. When I reminded him of her some years later, he said, “Who?”

  Tolkien and his wife bickered. But friends noted how, in their old age, they functioned as a sort of kindly two-headed creature. One visitor recalled Tolkien discoursing on etymology at the same time that his wife described a grandchild’s measles—speaking over each other, but in harmony. On summer evenings, they sat together on their front porch or in their garden, smoking and marveling at how with little in the way of role models, they had created their own happy family.

  In that letter to his son, Tolkien blamed the “soul mates” myth on the Romantic chivalric tradition: “Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake. . . . It takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man’s eye off women as they are”—that is, “companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.”

  One fall, a few months into my infatuation with Steve, I was visiting Jeremy and he took me to a house party. Steve was there, but he acted like he didn’t even know me. I looked out a window onto a roof where some people were gathered. I saw him canoodling with what appeared to be a short brunette cheerleader.

  I wanted to file a complaint with a bureaucratic agency, one that might deluge him with certified letters and tie him up in courts.

  “He’s my soul mate,” I would have written on the triplicate forms, “and so we’re supposed to be together forever, or surely we’re supposed to get more than a season of making out on the bench seats of his Buick.”

  I couldn’t even plead my case to our friends. First of all, they were his friends—other nineteen-year-old men who drove in demolition derbies and tacked High Times centerfolds to their bedroom walls. I was just an occasional visitor from the city wearing blackberry lipstick.

  My whole romance with Steve had taken place in the literal and figurative dark. I sent him a note, through a friend of mine who knew him from school. He never wrote back. I started to think I’d imagined everything.

  “Did Steve ever care about me?” I asked Jeremy.

  “Yes, he loved you,” Jeremy said. “He just couldn’t handle how intense it was.”

  Jeremy lied to me a lot over the years; this one time I was grateful.

  Not long after that, Jeremy got caught with heroin near our apartment in the city. With Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love” playing in the background, Jeremy swore to me that he’d been framed. I didn’t believe him. He insisted that if I really cared about him, I would defend him to our parents.

  “Okay,” I said dramatically, “but if it turns out later that you were lying, I’ll never believe you again.” He swore up and down. Years later, at Thanksgiving, I made some reference to it and he said, “Oh, yeah, no, I totally bought those drugs.” We mostly lost touch after that.

  The soul mate ideal appears in Plato’s Symposium. Zeus, seeking to humble humankind, split us in half, condemning us to wander in search of our other half: “So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.”

  The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is credited with coining the term “soul mate” in English, though he seems to be thinking of the concept more practically. “In order not to be miserable,” he tells a young woman contemplating marriage, “you must have a Soul-mate as well as a House or a Yoke-mate.”

  The former monk Thomas Moore offers a Coleridgean take on soul mates: “If you agree to harbor another person’s soul,” Moore wrote in 1994, “you are in for a bout with the unknown. Even that person has no idea what is in store for him and where he will be asked to go next. So when we agree to share lives, we are offering to be part of a dynamic, unpredictable adventure.”

  The summer I was twenty-eight, the phone rang at six a.m. in the loft apartment Neal and I were sharing in Brooklyn. We were a few weeks away from our wedding. I wondered, blearily, if a guest in a different time zone could be calling to change an RSVP. I answered the phone to learn that Jeremy was dead. He had hung himself.

  When I’d seen him in prior years at family functions, he’d had a manic energy. His perpetually wide-open eyes and rictus grin had made him seem like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers version of my cousin. But he’d been living with a girlfriend and doing electrical work and in touch with other people in our family, and so I hadn’t worried about him too much. Now I felt guilty that I hadn’t tried to keep him close.

  Neal and I packed our bags and went upstate. At the funeral home, which stood next door to the church where we would marry a month later, we saw him laid out. He looked strange and scary, and like he was holding his breath.

  My teenage mind fixated on Truth and Beauty and the Real and other Ideals Requiring Capital Letters. Raised agnostic, I craved some sort of spiritual awakening. At garage sales, I bought books with titles like Mysticism or Into the Unknown. And I thought a lot about death. Tolkien described death as “the divine paradox.” In life, love is flawed. In death, it is perfect. In life, I’d had complicated feelings about Jeremy. Now, I felt nothing but sorrow.

  The service was held by a stream on my aunt and uncle’s property, in the same spot where they had been married many years before. As they had for my photo-lab boss, the eulogies here seemed to be about someone other than the person I’d known. They described him in generic, touchy-feely terms. I hadn’t planned to say anything, but I felt called to speak, like they say people do in Quaker meetinghouses.

  “I’m listening to you talk about Jeremy,” I said, standing up, “and I think it’s nice that you all remember him as such a sweet person. I remember him differently. I loved him, but I can’t forget he was also so bad.”

  I mentioned a few of the pranks he’d pulled on me when we were children: he convinced me that there was a ghost lurking in a nearby old foundation, and that there was a mummy inhabiting the locked closet of the room where I slept (or, from then on, did not sleep). Once he shook me awake and dragged me a quarter mile down the road to a field, where he showed me a crop circle and told me an elaborate story about having seen a spaceship land, going so far as to draw pictures of the aliens. (He later confessed that he’d woken before dawn and spent hours riding his bike in circles to make the grass lay down that way.)

  I recalled him shooting me with bottle rockets and throwing leeches at me and pushing me out of rubber rafts. What I didn’t say but thought was that for as much as I’d loved him, he had been gone from my
life for a while. I had missed him, I realized, a lot, and for a long time. Suicide doesn’t always happen all at once; sometimes the person leaves the world little by little.

  After the service, Neal and I were walking back up to the house for the reception, my high heels sinking into the grass, when Steve, who I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a decade, stopped me.

  “Hey, Ada,” he said, standing there with the eyes and the glasses and the tall, thin body.

  “I liked what you said,” he told me.

  What I would have done for this much attention from him back in high school made me shudder. I would have killed for this. I would still be in jail.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You guys were always doing stuff like that, but I was still happy you let me hang out with you.”

  I introduced him to Neal, and he introduced me to his fiancée.

  “This is Jeremy’s cousin,” he said to her. “She and I had a little thing back in the day.”

  A little thing.

  In the midst of death, I felt a rush of joy.

  I worried that his fiancée would be annoyed by this talk of our little thing—our little thing; our little thing—and that her distress would mar my delight. So I said, “Steve’s too nice. I was just a kid with a crush on him.” Which was true, too.

  Neal, amused by my gloating, said, “Well, that must have felt good,” as we walked up the hill to the reception.

  Was Steve my soul mate? Maybe. But what’s that worth in the long run? If we’d moved into a trailer in the woods, like I’d wanted to, so many good things never would have happened to him or to me. If Steve was my soul mate, soul mates are overrated.