Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)
Page 5
Then he admits that he probably doesn’t even really want Christian. Too much trouble, he says. He says he wants to be someone’s pet, so he doesn’t have to worry about money anymore. He sighs and says, “I’m too old to be a pet now. Or else I’d have to find someone sixty-five-ish, in L.A. Someone who produced Adrienne Barbeau in the seventies and invested well.
“I wonder what she’s doing now,” he adds, with real interest. As always I can hear the steady hum of the QVC channel in the distance. Since Dusty gave up alcohol, he has cross-addicted to QVC.
Dusty was the recreation leader at our middle school, growing up. He has always been exactly like this; but the adults never knew, so we were allowed to be friends. And now the adults don’t matter. Now we are the adults.
• • •
Michael and I picked out our wedding invitations, at a little store on Union Street. The salesgirl kept it light by chewing on a bran muffin and making personal calls throughout the interview. As we flipped through the books, Michael kept gravitating toward the more casual typefaces, the unadorned papers.
The first typeface he likes is plain and simple, no engraving or calligraphy.
“It just screams ‘second marriage,’ doesn’t it?” I say to the salesgirl.
“Yes.” She agrees.
“This is my first marriage,” I explain to Michael, through her.
At length we choose a different typeface for the invitations, one Michael really likes. I agree, although the S’s look like meat hooks.
The whole invitation-ordering process makes me uneasy. The tiny awkward couch, the salesgirl and her huge endless crumbly muffin. The oversized sample books crowd me with choices, all of them unbelievably petty but nonetheless irrevocable and symbolic in some deep, unconsidered way. Everything says something about us as a couple. Even the envelopes. “The first impression,” I am informed by the salesgirl.
Michael then tries to dissuade me from envelope lining. The one I like is a satiny alabaster. Forty-five dollars extra. I hold my ground. I feel that I have done enough, agreeing to the meat hooks. I don’t want plain envelopes. I want the white go-go boots. Everyone else has them.
Finally we agree on everything else, including the invitation response cards. Flipping back through one of the books, we turn to a page filled with examples of pink monogrammed matchbooks that say “Patty and John, June 12, 1994.”
“It’s so New Jersey,” I say to the salesgirl.
In the instant I say this, I know that she is from New Jersey. But by then, of course, it is too late.
Michael leaves his socks on the floor when he takes off his shoes after work. This used to be fine. But now a sock on the floor isn’t just a sock on the floor. It’s a sock on the floor for the rest of my life.
At night he undresses just at the edge of his side of the bed. In the morning, he steps nimbly over the discarded pants, shorts, and crumpled belt. He is finished with them; the movement between there and the hamper would impede his speed and efficiency. Besides, they magically disappear, these dirty clothes. The enchanted fairies come and take them away.
“I’m not your mother,” I say. “I shouldn’t have to pick up after you.”
“Then don’t,” he says. “No one’s making you.”
“You are,” I shout. “You are by not doing it yourself.”
Insta-Shrew: Just add diamonds.
Michael went to the movies with Graham, something dark and independent. Afterward, they will go to Roosevelt’s Tamale Parlor.
I didn’t go to the movies with them; I told them I felt ill. After they left, I danced a little jig by the refrigerator as I popped a beer and settled in for the evening to watch the Daffy Marathon on the Cartoon Network.
More and more we are both sneaking alone time. If we ever find a house, I look forward to having my own room. Maybe a wing.
It’s the constant togetherness that chafes. No matter how much you love someone, you eventually reach the point where you feel like Kathleen Turner saying to Michael Douglas, Sometimes I just want to smash your face in.
This morning I put a piñata up in my office doorway. People came by to bash it with a mailing tube.
Then out of nowhere my boss, the Creative Director from L.A., appeared. He wore a black linen shirt with a Nehru collar. Baggy pleated black pants and pointy eelskin Bruno Magli shoes. His shoes reminded me of Howard Gossage, who once asked a woman where she got her shoes sharpened. He never visits my office; his fun alarm had gone off.
He stood in the doorway, fingering his goatee. Frowning.
He said, “When did you put this up?”
“Just now,” I said. He smiled mildly, looking at the candy on the floor. Mentally considering whether to let me keep the piñata or not.
Finally, he picked up a piece of candy, looked at it, put it down, and said, “We must not be keeping you busy enough. That’s all going to change soon.”
The Creative Director from L.A. said no more. He had the power to insinuate and then move on.
I waited until everyone was at lunch, and then I took down the piñata. Swept up the candy, put it in a bowl. People in advertising will eat anything.
Had a long discussion with myself about taking another Valium, but didn’t. I have to save them for emergencies, not just humiliations.
Michael gets a phone call from his mother, Ilene, tonight, at 11 p.m., which means it’s 2 o’clock in Brooklyn. She never sleeps, Ilene. She seems, however, to know just when we are drifting off to sleep, and she telephones then.
Ilene tells Michael to wear a mask while gardening to ward against asthma and that fish are bad, all fish, not just big fish. She also is worried about mud slides. Michael explains that the Victorian we live in is built on bedrock. Ilene discusses botulism and how you can get it from fresh milk. How the elastic on your underwear rubbing against your bare skin can eventually give you skin cancer. She does all this within sixty seconds. It’s in the pivot.
Michael says, “OK,” “Yes,” “All right,” “Really?” and “OK,” and “I’ll keep that in mind.” He says all of this in the calm voice of someone who has known for a long time that he is going to die of a brain tumor.
I enjoy listening to him talk to his mother, then it’s something amusing that is happening to someone else, instead of something amusing that is happening to me, to which I have to respond. Other than her quarterly visits, I communicate with Ilene via cards and letters and the sending of Harry and David dried-fruit baskets three times a year, which is what she always asks for. She’s very nonspecific when I ask how she’s enjoyed them. I inquired about the figs once, and she just about broke a hip changing the subject. I think she hoards the fruit baskets. I imagine her placing them all in a room somewhere in her house, a room that someday Michael is going to have to clean out, which means I could potentially be asked to help.
I can easily envision Ilene stockpiling against some coming disaster, at which time she alone will be saved because she has dried fruit.
My brother, Mark, has offered to play the piano for our ceremony. He is thirty-eight years old and doesn’t own a television or a microwave or an answering machine. If you call him, he either answers the phone in person or he isn’t there. His car has manual windows.
Mark taught himself the piano at age ten and was playing Chopin nocturnes from memory at twenty; now he teaches children and adults piano for a living in Los Gatos, just outside Santa Cruz. He’s one of the best people I know, and the only person I know who has never seen an episode of Seinfeld.
We go over to his house to hear some selections for the procession. After hearing them all and drinking two bottles of Chilean Merlot, we choose Handel’s Largo.
His new librarian girlfriend sits silently by on the extra chair like a big cat, her black hair fanning around her face. Her eyes casually assess my brother as he plays. I instinctively don’t trust her. I know that look. It’s the I’m Waiting to See If Someone Better Comes Along look. I half expect her to start licking h
er hands to groom herself, but she doesn’t. She just watches.
I want to say, I see you, bitch.
• • •
I just read the tiny, nine-point-type information sheet inside my Pill packet. Michael made me go on the Pill, is how I tell it to myself, but actually I did it to control my PMS, which it isn’t doing. I still feel like Joan Crawford on steroids. I was so gratified when Beth told me she was PMSing once and got into a fight with her mother and wanted to pull over on the freeway, push her out of the car, and back over her.
I inspected the Pill brochure to see if there was any truth to the rumor of side effects. Upon inspection, nothing proved askance but an increased risk for sterility, high blood pressure, and cancer of the breast, cervix, and liver. Oh, and blood clots that fly swiftly to your brain.
When you pass thirty-five as a woman and your hormones start raging, they should just tell you, You get to be sick, or you get to take drugs that kill you. Then they could pass out magazines to flip through until you decide.
I call my friend Ray at his law firm in Dallas, where he moved after college and never moved back. People in high school used to hate Ray because he was muscular and good-looking and first-string quarterback, but he just kept on being those things. Then Ray stopped playing football and went to Stanford with me, also majoring in English with a straight B-minus average. We were nothing there together, which was kind of nice. Nobody hates you.
Ray says he just talked to Dusty. Dusty and Ray have been friends as long as Dusty and I have been friends. I ask Ray how Dusty is doing.
“Still gay,” he says. Ray’s been married twice and has twin sons. Like mine, Ray’s father was a minister, and unlike mine, his father still practices: Episcopalian.
Ray launches into an impromptu discussion about the upcoming holidays and religion. He says, “I only went to church because I loved my dad. It meant nothing to me.”
“I believe all religion was a human creation to deal with suffering, back when everybody only lived to be twenty-three. They had to believe in something,” he says. “When I heard about the Mormons, with the crickets and shit, I couldn’t believe it.
“The Muslims are no better,” he adds.
I wait for him to tell me about the Muslims. He does.
“It’s all about some spaceship,” he says in a confused voice. “And Allah arriving on the other side of the moon, along with some guys on camels.”
There is a small pause. Ray receives an incoming business call from New York, which he summarily dismisses.
“I know it has something to do with the other side of the moon, camels, and some golden path. I mean if you just wrote up the unabridged version of that and plopped it down in front of one hundred people who’d never been introduced to any of it, they’d tell you: ‘This is a loon case. This is a cult.’
“Look at the Catholics,” he says. He’s drawling now. “All those uniforms for everybody and the pope in a pointy white hat, saying not to use condoms and how women can’t be priests.
“And there’s a bunch of ’em, man.”
Ray’s wife is Catholic. He tells me she has recently announced that she wants their two boys to be raised Catholic. Which is why I guess we’re talking about all this; also because we both like to talk instead of doing what we’re supposed to be doing, which is operating our wheelbarrows in hell. He continues, in his summation voice.
“I just want to say to all of these religions, What are you talking about? Just give me a shred of evidence.
“I mean, all we know for sure is, you go into the ground and worms eat you.”
Right after I talk to Ray, I call Dusty. I can hear his television on in the background. I tell him I’m flirting with the idea of Judaism, after Michael and I are married.
Dusty says that nobody’s doing Judaism anymore, that the new thing in New York is Buddhism, which he says is much more circa 2010.
“Christians were the eighties, Jews were the nineties, and now it’s Buddhism.”
I tell him about Ray’s wife wanting their sons to be raised Catholic.
He sighs like he has just seen a hurt puppy.
“Catholicism is so sad. Very fifties.”
He further informs me that Mormonism is the religion of repressed homosexuality … thus the polygamy. In a high falsetto, he says, “I can’t be gay—just ask my wives!”
Dusty thinks that Paul Newman is gay, and Tom Cruise and John Travolta and Al Gore. Also Mister Rogers and the original Captain Kangaroo.
Then he says, “I have to go now. They’re doing Big Bold Gold on QVC, and they don’t do that very often.”
• • •
Last night an argument. They come out of nowhere, like tornadoes.
Michael yelled, I cried. I took the ring off, which is my big move now. I don’t just take it off; I take it off, put it in its box, and hand it back to him.
He put it in his pocket and went to the Lucky Penny twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Geary and ate a patty melt.
“Patty melts are good when you’re mad,” he said to me this morning. It was all he said. But he did hand the ring box back.
After he went to work, I looked inside the box to make sure the ring was there. Then I slipped it onto my third finger and called my best friend, Lana, in Albuquerque. Lana and I met in homeroom in seventh grade; we’ve known each other twenty-four years. Lana looks like Linda Hamilton and can crack every bone in her body.
“It was about chicken broth,” I say. “We were out of chicken broth.”
I hear her nod, from the teacher’s lunchroom at the high school where she teaches drama. In the middle of my story she stops me and says, “Hold on …
“What’s going on?” she screams at her students down the hall. I hear her suede-booted footsteps going toward them. I hear them scatter. In a minute she comes back to the phone and says in a normal voice, “Go ahead.”
I tell Lana everything, which feels great because, for most people, I edit. Most people are definitely getting along on the Cliffs Notes.
It started when I was making a recipe, from Susan Powter’s cookbook, I told her. I started cooking and discovered that we were out of garlic.
I went into the living room and announced this to Michael, who was flopped out on the couch, watching the news. He snapped off the television, put on his coat, and walked to the corner store to buy garlic, with the air of a man about to donate bone marrow. He came home and threw the garlic down the hall, onto the kitchen table. Then he went back to the couch.
It goes without saying that I was never out of fresh garlic when I lived alone.
I got to the end of the recipe and went into the living room and said, “Guess what, we’re out of chicken broth.” He stood up and placed one fist on his hip, like the letter P.
“You should have read ahead in the recipe,” he accused.
At that point, I did what I had to do: I implicated him in the missing broth. I said that last time I looked, we had plenty of broth. He must have used it up, I said, and not told anyone.
We both commenced shouting at the same time. It seemed we were no longer discussing chicken broth, but who was going to get the final space in the lifeboat.
I kept saying, “Listen, it’s no big deal, I just need some CHICKEN BROTH.”
Then Michael went to the Lucky Penny and had a patty melt. I put everything away in the refrigerator and had a bowl of Grape Nuts.
When I tell Lana all of this, she describes how she and Raul fight over who is going to change Isabel’s diaper, how he claims the baby doesn’t need to be changed when her diaper is hanging to her ankles, stuffed. When her turds are literally skittering across the floor.
“They’re that way,” Lana says, brightly. Then she whispers in a demonic hush, “Spoiled.”
This makes me feel better, more normal. Yet I suspect deep down that it is not all his fault. Mama’s making the Shake ’n Bake, but I’m helping somehow.
One thing I know for certain, this is not about chi
cken broth. When I think of finding out what it is about, I want to weep with fatigue.
After my session with Reuben I bought six cans of chicken broth and three large heads of garlic. I know it’s not that simple, but it feels good.
Reuben says he wishes everyone who gets married to have a good fighting marriage. He himself has a good fighting marriage, to another psychoanalyst whose name is Sheila. It’s possible for me to believe in good, fighting marriages and also be very glad that he and his wife don’t live upstairs. I think once you’ve heard your therapist shrieking over who ate the last banana, you’re finished.
Michael’s mother, Ilene, called last night, and I answered the phone, thinking it was Michael. Busted.
Ilene told me that women have to act like the man is smarter, even though he’s not, and they have to act like the man is stronger, even though he’s not.
She said I have to be nice to Michael, and patient. So he’s told her about the arguments.
“You have to be nice to Michael.” She said, “It’s your job, as his wife.” Ilene is not one to mince words. She doesn’t mind conflict; it makes her feel more alive.
“I’m not his wife yet,” I said. She ignores this. Like a tank, she is able to barrel over ground most lesser vehicles are slowed by.
“You have to make him happy, as a man.”
I took a cleansing breath. Finally I said, “Yes, but it’s hard making someone happy three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
“Well, you have to,” she said. “Otherwise …” Her voice trails off to indicate a terrible conclusion, which is understood to be unspeakable.
Then she was off, in a puff of orange smoke.
We’re flying to Taos, for Lana’s wedding to Raul.
Lana and I got engaged within two weeks of each other, this last fall. Both of us to men who’ve been divorced and have one child. Somehow without exactly planning it, we do everything together; except she and Raul had Isabel a year before they got engaged. We’ve been friends longer than we’ve been people; she’s the sister I never had. She is the jackpot sibling.