Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Suzanne Finnamore

  My ring throws off prisms of light. When I drive in the morning especially, I love watching the tiny rainbows splay across the leather interior of my car. I may die that way, staring at the ring. Plowing head-on into a semi, entranced. Exactly what such a person deserves.

  Out in the world, everyone concentrates on the minutiae of the wedding. The dress, the caterers. People are concerned about place cards. It’s as though they don’t watch the news.

  “Are you going to wear white?” a woman I hardly know asks me. It is clear from the menacing tilt of her head that she expects an answer.

  Without thinking, I say no. Cream, is what I say. Inside I am astounded that this matters, that it would even come up. I am even more surprised that I have an opinion. Cream.

  Yesterday I met my friend Beth for lunch at Grumpy’s. Beth is a recovering shopaholic who looks like Michelle Pfeiffer, except with very short white-blond hair and a scar on one cheek from when she went through the windshield at age five. Beth was eighty thousand dollars in debt at twenty-five; she’s been credit card free for ten years. I met her at Macy’s in 1989, where we were both buying vacuums. She said she was only allowed to do that because she was paying cash and because hers had blown up when she tried to suck up a whole bag of cat litter. I remember thinking, Finally. Someone I can relate to.

  Over lunch, Beth tells me that she and her husband, Robert, don’t have sex anymore. She says it was never that great, and since Max was born, they don’t do it at all.

  “But hey,” she says. “Sex isn’t everything.”

  This disturbs me. Because I know, actually, that it is. Yet when she says this, I nod. It is important to me that Beth and Robert do not break up. They are one of the couples I need to believe are happy in order to pioneer my own happiness. I don’t want them to get divorced. I don’t want anyone to get divorced.

  Then she says she truly loves Robert. She says it with her eyebrows raised, daring me to object.

  I smile, robotic. I am thinking that she is only thirty-five. I am thinking that while sex isn’t everything, it’s not nothing either: there should be a minimum.

  Beth has the mushroom gardenburger. She puts extra salt on her fries and eats them one by one, pressing them against the bottom of her plate, to pick up the excess grains.

  “I do miss sex.” She sighs, as though it were a dog that ran away.

  After lunch I go back to my office, close the door, and eat four chocolate Snack Well sandwich cookies.

  Michael and I will be different. I will wish it so. Like in a dream where you realize you’re dreaming, and you can change things.

  Michael works on a variety of packaged-goods accounts, the biggest of which is Sara Lee, home of the Rich Buttery Taste. Watching phyllo dough triangles tumble off a cookie sheet all day long can be less interesting than you’d think, yet he goes in every day, at 8 a.m. I sleep for another hour and then I get up and go to my own job, in advertising. What my partner Graham calls another room in hell.

  Graham is a twenty-five-year-old art director, the other half of our creative team. He was raised in London. His parents are around four hundred years old apiece and used to sit at home reading the Times with him when he was two. Then Graham grew up and moved to San Francisco and became an art director, and my first boss Katherine hired him. Then she hired me and put us together on the California Lottery account. It was all arranged before we were born.

  Graham is small and wan with ice-blue eyes. His hair is orange and he wears baggy pants that almost fall off. At first glance Graham looks like a paperboy, but when you look into his eyes he turns into the head of the CIA. He can draw a razor-straight line freehand and knows how to say no to people who come from upstairs.

  I rationalize that I am making advertising less awful, that the work Graham and I do is less harmful and more enlightened, because we do pro bono public service announcements for AIDS awareness and fund-raising ads for public zoos, which when you think about it are the most nihilistic fascists going and might as well exhibit their leopards in boxcars. But all that’s really a rationalization. I’m right in there, grinding it out. I’m every bit as disgusting as the people who do the cartoon cigarette billboards aimed toward minors and the makers of matchbooks that promise artistic fame and say, Can You Draw Binky?

  Today Graham is at an edit session for a television commercial we have created for high-top basketball shoes. In a time-honored ritual, the art director is forced to stand by and watch as his meticulously designed scenes are questioned, maimed, and ultimately destroyed by a brand manager who swoops into the editing bay at the last minute. At this time, the company logo is customarily adjusted to fill the screen.

  Graham called me toward the middle of the ritual, and whimpered in the dulcet tones of the Beaten Down. He was, however, cheered by the fact that I have spent my morning making long-distance personal phone calls and watching Kurosawa’s Ran on the VCR monitor in our office with the sound turned off, to the tune of The Best of Tom Jones played at top volume on the CD player. He feels that by doing this instead of writing shoebox copy, I am letting freedom ring.

  Graham has an expression for anything that keeps one away from the creation of advertising. He calls it a Harm Umbrella. We try to get under it as often as possible. We have similar goals, which are to do as little as possible, to get paid as much as possible, and to complain constantly while this is going on.

  It’s not all leisure. Often we work furiously against a strategy that doesn’t exist, for clients we don’t have. Yesterday we spent the morning concepting new slogans for the International Prune Board.

  Prunes. Join The Movement!

  Go Ahead, Make A Splash … With Prunes.

  Little. Black. Wrinkled. Prunes!

  Prunes … They Used To Be Plums.

  So Delicious, You Could Eat Them Like Candy. But Don’t.

  Our favorite game is Outlate. This is where we, on regular workdays when we’re not away on production, attempt to outlate each other. Like I’ll come in at 9:45, and maybe Graham has just come in five minutes earlier, at 9:40. The next day I come in at 10; he comes in at 10:20. The next day I figure maybe about 10:55, so I time it perfectly, and just as I see him coming around the corner in his lime-green convertible, I drive around the block a few times, go to the bank and get a latte at the coffee stand next to the ATM; but when I get to work, he’s still not there. He’s gone out for a full breakfast. So the next day I come in at 11:30, quarter to 12. Graham tools in after lunch, carrying a shopping bag from Pottery Barn.

  That is why he’s the champion.

  • • •

  Chicken has become an issue. I want it twice a week; Michael gets tired after once. I feel starved for chicken; he feels chicken is keeping him from the cornucopia of life.

  I talked to Reuben about it, at our therapy session yesterday. Reuben is a seventy-year-old Marin County prominent Jungian. That’s how I describe him to people: a seventy-year-old Marin County prominent Jungian. I’ve been seeing him since last month, when I started to feel like I was flying apart. I tell myself it’s just the engagement, but of course it isn’t. It’s the fact that I am not remotely, as Anne Lamott would say, well enough to be doing this.

  Reuben said that when people get engaged, conflict comes bubbling to the surface. He said that while seemingly petty, it hides something deeper. That it’s our job as a couple to find out what that is. That it’s probably a very old story, from our childhood, and has nothing to do with the other person.

  Then he splayed his fingers together into an arch, and said, “Plato believed that all human beings live in a cave, and all they can see are the shadows that they themselves cast against the wall.

  “We never get to see the full picture,” he explained.

  “Then what am I doing here?” I ask.

  We both pretend that I am joking.

  It’s 1 a.m. and I’m awake, stealing time. Michael’s sleeping, making the faraway train sound with his breath. I enjoy hearing men sl
eep. It’s a shame they can’t do more of it, or even occasionally lapse into a mini-coma, and the women would get to be free for a few days. We could wake them up by ringing a bell of some sort.

  I stare at the apricot walls. Months it’s been, here in the two-bedroom one-bath Victorian flat with the crazy South African landlady upstairs, who gardens in a half-slip and a Chanel jacket, hair in curlers, fully made-up.

  It’s cursed, this place. Gabrielle cursed it, you can’t blame her. Four years together and no proposal. Then I come along and, eighteen months later, bam. Not that it was that easy, but you could see how it looked to her. Like you played all your nickels, and the next person to sit down hits.

  I remember the first time I saw Michael’s flat. Bare rooms, dust balls, nail holes peppering the blank walls. Being a straight man, he had done nothing after she left except buy a new VCR and connect it to the wide-screen TV, which, his being a straight man, was the one thing he wouldn’t part with.

  Before she left, Gabrielle lingered for nine months, still living here and calling France every day to have long, tearful conversations with her three sisters, one of whom thought she should poison Michael, two who thought she could do better. Her mother felt that if he didn’t own his own home by now he never would, and perhaps higher ground was indicated.

  At the end of nine months Gabrielle touched him for first and last month’s rent and a new Sealy Posturepedic, rolled everything up in the Oriental rugs, and sledded out like the Grinch. Luckily she’d found a reasonably priced south-of-Market indoor/outdoor loft space from which to date new, younger men and from which to phone Michael and threaten to kill him every five minutes. As Michael and I lay together in the dark trying to get used to each other naked, she called to whisper about homicide, but I knew she wouldn’t. She was the gum on your shoe type, not the ha ha you’re dead type.

  She had long curly hair the color of redwood, and the thinnest waist I have ever seen. Green eyes, high Parisian accent, the entire catastrophe. I met her once at Juice World, when Michael and I were just friends. It was clear from her benign expression that she didn’t consider me a threat. She looked at me like a fly on the other side of the glass. I have short brown hair and no waist; I go straight down from the armpits.

  When they first broke up I felt sorry for her (this was when I felt sorry for anyone who couldn’t be with Michael) and then she called me twenty times in a row one night at my apartment and hung up, and then I didn’t anymore. I admire her stamina is how I feel now.

  A few weeks later she called Michael to tell him that she had seen me again on Union Street, and that she was much prettier than I was. That may be true, I thought, and it may not be true. But today I threw out your shampoo.

  Soon after she left, I moved in.

  At length, I came across her markers. Unlike the lone forgotten packing crate, there was clearly a method at work. Velvet evening bags, toothbrushes, Velcro ankle weights, a pink tampon case. Photographs of her blowing kisses into the camera; she was extremely photogenic, had once made the back cover of French Vogue. Sun hats, vegan cookbooks, a volume of Kahlil Gibran, in which she had highlighted key passages in yellow marker. A small clay cherub, which I smashed with a hammer. Then I prowled around like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, looking for something else of hers to break.

  There is some progress. I no longer feel as if she is going to burst into the bedroom and spray us with gunfire.

  This place is like a way station. I try to have the detached air that one has waiting for trains.

  I don’t know anyone who got someone fresh.

  We’re not speaking. Lines were drawn swiftly and wordlessly. He has the kitchen and the back office. I have the front of the flat, including the living room. I’ve set up an embassy in the bedroom.

  Michael doesn’t feel we need a professional photographer for the wedding. He feels snapshots taken by his friend who directs industrial videos are the way to go. Capture the moment, is how he put it. I would like someone named Kale from the SF Design Center who charges three thousand dollars. Capture the wedding, is how I put it. Hire a photographer.

  Good things, I pointed out to Michael, cost money. Money is why we operate wheelbarrows in hell, I reminded him. We have money, I believe. Michael disagrees. To Michael, we are clinging with one fingernail to the lip of poverty’s yaw, about to plummet into complete skid row destitution at the next unnecessary extravagance, like heat.

  He’s out there, right now, chopping onions for dinner. Chopping is helpful. I would like to chop. Now that he is, of course, I can’t.

  I hear a jar pop as it is twisted open. The marinated artichoke hearts I buy for salads. No silverware sounds, which means he’s standing in the kitchen and eating them right out of the jar. A sharp report; he’s uncorked a bottle of wine. The television is switched on, the small Sony that gets the best picture in the house.

  I want to watch television and drink wine and eat artichoke hearts. It seems more important than any principle I may have been hanging on to.

  I want to have a good time, too. Or I would like to ruin it for him.

  He’s sleeping, covers spooled around him. I can just see his head above the pillow. Michael has what I call a stubborn neck, which means that from the rear it looks like his neck is as wide as his head. I observe once more how his hairline curves gently and comes to a point at his nape. In a crowd of necks, I’d know his right away. Still. I wish he were younger, because I am afraid he might die before me.

  I wish he had never been married before, because he’s already done everything with his first wife, Grace. He was thirty-one when they went on their honeymoon in Spain. I resent him being thirty-one with someone else. Deeply. Somehow he should have known, and saved himself for me. If he really loved me, he would have.

  First wife, second wife. I will always be second. Even if his first wife dies, I don’t move up the ladder. It’s not like being an understudy. It’s much more complicated. Second. It’s so Nancy Kerrigan.

  I told all this to Graham over lunch at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store today, while we ate focaccia sandwiches. Graham said, “Why don’t you just have his memory erased?”

  Graham always has the best suggestions.

  Phoebe, Michael’s daughter, is thirteen. I haven’t met her. No one finds this unusual or even particularly a bad thing. The unspoken consensus is that it’s cleaner this way. I wrapped her gift at Christmas and on her birthday; she doesn’t know this. But I suspect Grace does. She knows Michael couldn’t come up with those bows.

  Michael sees Phoebe once a year, in Vermont, for two weeks during the summer.

  Reuben says that “And they both lived happily ever after” are the most false and damaging words in the English language.

  Michael talks to Graham about movies, they like each other despite the eighteen-year age difference. Michael sometimes telephones Graham to ask him about music when he’s looking for something new. He is not ashamed to ask, What are the kids listening to? Whereas I surreptitiously copy down the CD titles from Graham’s music collection, then buy them and act as if I knew all along.

  Graham knows which CDs the kids are listening to. Graham knows because he knows actual kids, genuine nineteen-year-olds, some of whom he sleeps with.

  Michael once recommended a film to Graham and said it was a feel-good movie.

  “I don’t want to feel good,” Graham said.

  Yesterday, Michael had to take the Cow to the vet on upper Fillmore, and it was a hundred dollars.

  He has been spending a hundred dollars every day this month, he told me this morning, and is putting a stop to it. He alluded to the ring, also. The ring which has sucked him dry.

  I look down at my hand and the diamond dances and sparkles in the warm overhead light from our bedroom fixture. I laugh wickedly to myself, like the chambermaid who ripped off Scrooge’s bed curtains. But only to myself. I realize that it is important to act as if I am not driving him to bankruptcy, a place I know with pretty fai
r certainty that I am headed.

  Last night I clipped Safeway coupons. We are now going to save two dollars on Edna Valley Chardonnay.

  Michael announces that today he is not leaving the house, so he won’t have to spend another hundred dollars.

  I’m losing weight. My watch is loose; the face keeps slipping around so I can’t see the time. They say that happens when you get engaged, you dwindle. I feel uneasy. My soul may be contained in that extra pound. I could be pissing out my soul.

  People I haven’t seen in a while coo, as if I am a child who has completed a difficult task. It’s clear that I have gained status in the society, being both newly engaged and thinner. My former self feels slighted. Was I that bad off? I was happy most of the time, I think. I don’t remember. Yes I do. I was not so happy. But not unhappy.

  A dirty voice in my head suggests that this may be some kind of elaborate practical joke. I’ll wake up alone in my old apartment, devils poking my thighs with pitchforks.

  • • •

  At four o’clock on Monday: Reuben. I sit down on the couch and say, “I don’t think I have anything to say today.”

  “That’s OK. I’ll wait,” he says.

  A minute goes by, then another. I become aware that I am paying for air. I try to conjure a worthy issue, not too big, not too small. Yet everything feels too complicated or embarrassing. Tomorrow is my father’s birthday, but I’m not going to bring that up.

  “I just don’t have anything to talk about, I guess.”

  “Those are always the best sessions,” he says. He settles back in his chair.

  Another minute goes by. I shred Kleenex. I arrange the shredded Kleenex. I am not going to crack.

  Then he says, “You ever heard of the gnostic gospels?”

  I don’t answer. I am thinking, Maybe he is too old to even be doing this.

  He quotes, “ ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will kill you.’ ”