He looks happy in the photograph and so do I. I once saw him vomit into the kitchen trash can, and a moment later continue to mix drinks.
When he gave me a black eye, I left him.
But thanks for asking, in other words.
I went to look at rings, at Tiffany’s. Alone. I wanted to get the lay of the land.
A Chinese man with a terrible wig sells me up to a twenty-thousand-dollar ring. A wide platinum band with a huge white diamond slid into it. I have a hard time taking it off. I keep looking at myself in the mirror, with my hand held on my cheek like an Oil of Olay ad.
The ring twinkles madly. It seems to whisper, Hey girl. You really deserve me.
Everything else is really going to be a letdown, after me.
I am the IT ring.
Nearby a woman with a thick Southern accent is laughing softly and explaining how she can’t consider anything less than three carats. The saleswoman, a tall woman with Teutonic high cheekbones and black-rimmed glasses, nods in tacit agreement. Her blond chignon is wound tight as her smile. Yes, I imagine her saying, the children too. Everyone into the ovens.
As I leave Tiffany’s, I walk past the security man with the tinted glasses. He looks at me. I immediately look down. I notice that the carpets are stained.
I am pretty sure that Audrey Hepburn would not be caught dead here.
Everyone asks the same two questions.
“Did you know he was going to do it?”
“I had a feeling,” I say. My eyes slide sideways of their own accord.
They launch the second question right away.
“Have you set a date?”
“October nineteenth, of next year.”
I feel spared. My perception is that if you don’t have a date, they stone you.
We went to look at rings together, at Shreve’s. Since 1852. Michael said if we found something, we could buy it today. I felt I had just won a game show. It was all I could do to keep from skipping down the aisle.
Earlier this morning, I confessed to Michael I had fallen in love with the Chinese wig man Tiffany ring. I mentioned the twenty-thousand-dollar price. He assured me that this would never happen. Then when we got to Shreve’s, he was more than happy to fork over seven thousand dollars for the one I really wanted.
The ring is my lump-sum payment for everything bad that has ever happened to me. I don’t feel I can tell people this, or they will spoil it. I found it last week, when I cased the place alone. It meets all the minimum requirements for Cut, Color, and Clarity, as outlined by our salesman, Reed Cashman, who looks like an international spy posing as a diamond salesman. It’s a carat, in a simple four-prong solitaire setting.
That’s a lie. It’s .81 carat. I round up.
My mother called this morning to brief me on a fight she has had with Don. It was about his underwear being dyed pink.
“Accidentally,” she adds.
She has done this before. Never her underwear, always his. It’s not a mistake; it’s repertoire.
“What would Freud say?” I ask.
“What did Freud know about laundry?” she asks. “Screw Freud.”
This seems to settle things.
We exchange stories of malcontent fashioned from the oddments of our lives as women. She tells me about the laundry fight. I tell her about the commitment wars.
We are coming home from dinner. Michael has broken up with Gabrielle, in the Longest Breakup in the History of the World. She has moved out of his flat, and after a suitable period of insensate philandering, Michael has been dating me for six months. A quantity of wine has gone by from a place called Frog’s Leap.
The word “commitment” is brandished.
“You’re afraid of commitment,” I pronounce.
Silence.
“You’ll never change,” I say. “You don’t want to build anything.”
Michael says nothing, but continues to drive very carefully. There is a bomb in the car, his movements suggest.
“Fine,” I pronounce. “You should just be alone, then.”
Being with me is his only option. Distantly I know this is flawed logic, but I don’t have time to work it out. I slam out of the car and hurry up the front steps of my building. My high heels make a good sound on the marble. At this point I am completely in the moment, just doing the scene. It’s as Andy Warhol said: When I open my eyes, the movie begins.
I reach the door. Hand on the knob, I mentally preview the remainder of the night: alone, chain-smoking, waiting all night for the apology call, which doesn’t come, because he hasn’t actually done anything. Which is the problem. He never does anything, which lends itself to me doing all sorts of things.
I dash back down the stairs.
As I hit the street, his turn signal is blinking. Small terrifying puffs of smoke are coming from his exhaust pipe. His car inches forward, about to pull out into traffic. I begin to run, realizing how foolish I look. A large truck with the words ENJOY LIFE, EAT OUT MORE OFTEN roars by, delaying him by the necessary seconds. I reach the car and grasp the handle of his door, as if to stop it by physical force. I remember thinking that if I had to, I would.
We look at each other through the glass. He stops the car, but does not roll his window down.
“Hey,” I say; it is all I can think of. Also I’m out of breath. And drunk. I’m fairly certain of that now.
His face doesn’t change expression as his arm reaches around to unbuckle his seatbelt. I keep my eyes trained on his arm. If I look away he will change his mind.
That night he tells me he loves me, for the first time.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you ran.”
I met Michael at a Christmas party in 1992. We were introduced by Lesli, an agency producer I worked with at the time. He was alone, although Lesli informed me that he was living with a Frenchwoman whom he might marry. Then where is she? I thought, ever the mercenary. I felt it was like someone leaving an Italian greyhound tied loosely to a parking meter outside a liquor store: foolish.
I had seen him before, black haired, handsome, wearing a worn leather jacket and heavy dark boots, carrying a motorcycle helmet. Slouching up against a pillar inside the ad agency where I worked, knowing of course how the helmet helped, along with his unfamiliarity, his Guest Star sheen. He was freelancing there, getting twelve hundred a day to consider new and exciting ways to market salad oil, to make salad oil huge. I found it charming, his willingness to discuss things nobody else wanted to discuss. His eagerness to survive.
Michael has that. You get the feeling that if you were with him and you were taken hostage by terrorists with red bandannas, you would be among the few to escape. And that while you were waiting to escape, you would somehow be made comfortable.
And now here he was, at this Christmas party. Unattended.
Over icy Cosmopolitans in martini glasses, I discovered that he was Jewish, age forty-one, born in 1951: an age I found personally challenging and mysterious. After thirty-three years of being single, I had exhausted the ’64s, the ’62s, the ’58s and the ’57s. It was inevitable that I would get around to tasting the ’51s. Musty, but with an oaky finish that unfolds nicely on the tongue. Good complexity. Stands up well into ’99. Drink now.
As an extra incentive, Michael was also convinced by Lesli to give me a ride home, except he didn’t, exactly. He meandered around San Francisco, hopelessly lost. I thought at the time he was flirting, but now I know he was really lost; Michael couldn’t find his way out of a tunnel. As he careened from one irrevocable one-way street to another, we burrowed deep in conversation, braying at each other’s jokes with the enthusiasm of men and women who don’t know one another. I didn’t care what direction we were going, or if in fact the car was moving at all. We were having fun, and at thirty-three and forty-one, respectively, that was dangerous. At that stage in my life, I would kill for fun. I would lock a stranger in a car trunk and drive away laughing madly into the night, deciding against punching
airholes.
He drove me back to my car, but then at the last moment he suggested we go for a drink, which seemed to only reinforce the idea that our real lives didn’t have to resume. Not while there was still a bar left open in San Francisco.
We sat across the marbled bar at Il Fornaio looking intently at one another, burning holes in each other’s eyes. We drank fine white wine in thin Italian goblets. We warmed to our topics. We spoke of William Burroughs and Robert Mapplethorpe and Barbara Kruger. We evoked the gods of apathy: Warhol. Capote. Updike. Kerouac. We bandied slivers of monologue by David Mamet and Spalding Gray. There was very little that could stop us as we went on to our stories of personal travel, engulfed in a cloud of blissful pretense. There should be a police force to govern the upwardly mobile and stop them when they get like this, when we start to believe that we are well read and well traveled and that knowledge is within reach. They should come up to you just as you’re sipping your Pinot Grigio and quoting Nabokov and they should hit you in the face with a bat. It really would be better for everyone concerned.
But nobody stopped Michael and me. Then, abruptly, he opened his wallet, drawing out a small photograph. It was a picture of his daughter leaning on a snowboard. Phoebe.
We talked on. He said that after two years with a French hair model named Gabrielle, he was in a period of domestic confusion. He made it sound as if he had a wonderful yet clumsy maid whom he might have to let go. He was, the tilt of his eyebrows suggested, waiting to see if she improved. He hoped that she would.
I remember how I drank him all in, that night, like a tulip glass of fine port. He looked both tired and supremely relaxed. His whole face seemed to recline in an expression of relaxation and hidden reserves of carnal expertise. Anyone able to write strategies for the Wesson Family of Oils is arguably prodigious, perhaps even sensual. His whole being seemed comfortably forty-one, and slightly tanned. He was a tawny port.
I looked at Michael and I saw the epitome of Nice Jewish Man spread out before me. I took in the trim watch, the good shoes carefully brushed, the lines of patience around the eyes. From her kitchen in Carmel, my mother held up a wooden spoon in silent praise of the man that sat before me discussing opera. A wave of psychic enthusiasm passed over our heads from Carmel. My mother has wanted a nice Jewish man for me since before the beginning of time. She has wanted that since before the earth was a cloud of gas.
I knew then, arranging myself at the bar stool so my DKNY Nude legs were at their best advantage, that sophistication and adoration and my mother’s eternal blessing could be mine. If only I could eliminate Gabrielle. I took a sip of wine and backed a steamroller over her in my mind. I mentally placed us all on a vacation in Paris, where Gabrielle was from, a foreign country where they understood crimes of passion. I would ensconce myself in a hotel room adjacent to theirs. When she went out for baguette, I would pounce, some blunt object in hand. Perhaps a large hair dryer.
I saw her pinwheeling down the steps at Montmartre, flailing lifeless past the French carousel as the painted horses laughed silently and ironically. Afterward, Michael and I would accidentally meet as he walked along the Seine, and discuss his grief. Her family, of course, would handle the arrangements. We would check into the Hôtel Montalembert, because he would need to change hotels after what had happened, and it would be better if he weren’t alone.
It wouldn’t even have to be Paris, I thought. It could happen anywhere, anytime.
I wanted very badly, as Michael leaned forward across the bar and told me tales of contemporary literature, to look up and see her coffin being transported down Battery Street while a bevy of musicians played a gay Creole funeral march. I was deep in a fantasy without the hindrance of moralistic ceilings. Cardiac arrest, brain aneurysms, clinical diabetes. All of these danced like sugarplums out of my reach. I had no way to rid myself of Gabrielle. She had possession.
By midnight, we had discussed all topics that reflected well on either of us. We had held up the mirror of mutual narcissism and had not been found wanting. But it was aborted by the fact that he, Michael, had the lack of foresight to choose Gabrielle a full two years before we had been brought together by Fate. I tried not to loathe him for his insistence on having a life before meeting me, but it was - difficult.
I told him that I wanted to say something. When I drink too much wine I start to announce my sentences before they appear. He slouched forward in the solicitous way that charming men have, the way that suggests that they were just marking time until they spoke with you, marking time their whole lives.
I said, “I think you’re intelligent and funny and handsome. And I wish you were single.” I thought I was being boldly confiding. In retrospect, I realize it was like saying, You know, there is air all around us.
He jammed his hands into his pockets, as if searching for a tidbit there that would satisfy. A minute talisman of truth which he could present in lieu of a response. Maybe he had small slips of paper with quotes from eighteenth-century poets in his pockets, waiting to be pulled forth as pithy offerings. But no. He had only credit cards and a California driver’s license with his photograph and the word “Taken.”
He decided, in the end, to save himself. He armed himself with the shield of ambiguity. Michael ran his tongue over his teeth thoughtfully. He then replied, “You may not hear from me for a long time.”
A good job, under the circumstances. Michael had managed to infer that he would be coming for me at some later time, and yet he had said nothing of the kind. He had kept himself clean. Not many men could do as much given the length of the evening, the wine consumed, and the reaction time allotted.
I admired Michael then, for all of his skills, even the ones he showed in maneuvering around me. Talking to him was deeply satisfying. Being with him held a natural pleasure. Perhaps he is gay, I thought.
But driving home alone that night, I knew two things for certain. Number one, Michael wasn’t gay. And, number two, I had met the man I was going to marry.
The next morning I drove to see my mother in Carmel. I sat in her kitchen, hungover and exhausted, and wept into my hands.
“What if he doesn’t leave her,” I said.
“He will,” she said.
Three and a half years later, he proposed.
My mother is a witch. Not a make-believe witch, not someone who dresses in black and attends outdoor all-woman festivals on the solstice. An actual witch.
Someone who knows.
Picked up the ring today. We have drinks at Le Central to celebrate. Michael has a Manhattan, which they bring in a small clear carafe with its own little ice bucket.
We make a toast.
“To us,” he says. We kiss.
Admiring the ring, I hold my arm outstretched, as if stopping traffic from advancing forward.
At the table next to us sits an older businessman with his mistress. She has thick platinum hair and a fur stole. He keeps patting her hand and calling her Sweetheart. I see the intelligence of a fox in her eyes. She smokes and watches me with great amusement.
This is all a show, her eyes suggest. We might just as well be one another.
• • •
Today I bought my first issue of Modern Bride magazine, the November issue. I have it right here. I ordered a year’s subscription, using the 1-800 number and not the business reply mail card.
Your Dream Dress (It’s Here!)
50 Romantic Honeymoons—from Sweet to Sexy
12 Reception Hints You Can’t Overlook
6 Real Bridal Makeovers with Expert Tips for You
I discover that holding the magazine makes me anxious. I put it down. I am wondering if there is a way to make me over and, if so, will I be able to be made back.
It strikes me that I am going to have to have a wedding. And it is going to have to be perfect, according to this magazine. There are twelve reception hints I can’t overlook. And that’s just the tip of the bayonet.
My gut feeling is, My God, haven’t
I done enough?
November
To look back is to relax one’s vigil.
BETTE DAVIS
Morning. Behind the door of our only bathroom, I hear Michael brushing his teeth with his ultrasound toothbrush. It sounds as though he is filing them to points. In our rifle-shaped Victorian flat, six small rooms all choked together, I can hear everything he does. And he can hear me. We perform behind scrims.
The water is turned on in the sink, a slow stingy stream. He begins to shave. I would like to watch, but he has locked me out, along with the Cow. This is a sacred place, a site of ritual. We are none of us worthy.
Next comes the lengthy hot bath, with the loofah. He rubs his entire body with a loofah mitt. Later I hear the shower running. After draining the tub, he stands under the shower and washes his hair twice. Lather, rinse, repeat. I never repeat.
He suffers, he is the first to point out, from acute dry skin. In winter, once a month he puts a special gel on his scalp and wears a shower cap to bed. Then I call him Do-Rag Man, and if he’s in a good mood he’ll sing to me in bed, in the voice of Paul Robeson.
I can always find a man with perfect skin. But where else will I find a man who can sing the Negro spirituals?
Rain tonight, our first of the season. I came home and made Cornish game hens with potatoes and rosemary. We ate in the kitchen.
I put on a cassette tape of Tony Bennett, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which was my father’s favorite song. I start to cry. Michael looks alarmed, drops his fork, and runs over to my side of the table.
“Sweetie, what’s wrong?”
“I’m just so happy,” I say. I feel this is a delayed reaction, like in trauma victims. I’ve been hit.
He brings me a paper towel and sits back down. Then he smiles apologetically and tucks into his potatoes.
We have lit candles, tonight. I hope we will always remember to do this, but even as I hope this I know that we won’t. We will forget.
Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 2