Lana got engaged first. That’s what triggered the ultimatum I gave to Michael over coffee. Lana and I had both been waiting for a long time, and then when she got hers, I wanted mine. Commitment-wise, things between Michael and me instantly went from Unresolved to Fucking Unacceptable.
When it happened, she called me before she even called her mother. I hung up the phone with her by pressing my finger on the flash button, and then I released the flash button and speed-dialed Michael at his office to relay the news.
“Raul just asked Lana to marry him.”
That’s all I said. But as everyone knows, it’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.
Now Michael’s right here next to me, eating dry-roasted peanuts, engaged to be married. Finished, in other words. Off the shelf. Whenever we hit turbulence, he holds my hand and squeezes. Not as if he is afraid, but as if he is just checking to see if I’m ripe.
It is tempting to believe that everything is going according to plan.
Lana’s wedding was lovely; they lit luminarias and we looked out over the Taos valley, which was covered in snow. Her mother, Eleanor, gave her away, alone. A small altar held Lana’s father’s photograph in a silver frame, one where he is entertaining his grandchildren with jokes, his face white with cancer.
“Who gives this woman into this marriage?”
“Her father and I,” Eleanor said.
Her voice broke only a little. She is brave, so we all pretended to be.
Isabel, their one-year-old, padded uncertainly down the aisle in tiny white slippers festooned with baby roses, chewing up the scenery. It seemed then as though that was the only good way, the sensible way. To have your baby and then get married.
Now that it’s all over I worry that Raul isn’t tall enough for Lana.
We used to make elaborate sundaes and name them after ourselves, with Frosted Flakes, raisins, coffee ice cream, and chocolate syrup. We went to school together every day on the same bus, which we constantly missed. She lived on my street, only down the block a little. If she walked in with John F. Kennedy Jr., I would find something to criticize. I’m that fucked up.
Back at work, sitting in my office, staring at Coit Tower. I am waiting for them to come for me: the account team. The men and women in Banana Republic suits and Ann Taylor outfits.
It’s not paranoia. They will come for us, for Graham and me. We have just sold a television campaign, and we have only minutes of cool freedom left. The wheels have been set into motion; the onerous wheel of production turns. Hands reach out for us, the hands of middle management, the people who stop exciting things from happening. They will swoop, confident in their soft black cashmere V-neck sweaters. Creeping up to my office with good reasons to change the copy, mincing on thin-soled Italian shoes, like assassins. Their eyeglasses and shoes are always Italian. They work under the principle that if they can accessorize European, they can be European.
They point toward the storyboards with their best church faces. They know what the client wants. They know that in advance, possessing great psychic powers which they choose to use exclusively in the advertising community. They will come and decree that revisions are vital, large and sweeping triple bypass revisions. If Graham and I pretend they are not there, they retaliate. They want to be part of the process, so they run back to their offices and their computers and they produce something terrible. It is called electronic mail. “E-mail” to those more advanced.
In these electronic missives, the People Who Stop Exciting Things From Happening are able to write things they are afraid to say to your face—like, Oh we’ve moved the airdates up six weeks. We’ve added outdoor, two retail donuts, and a radio campaign to the overall mix. We’ve promised the client they can absolutely be on for their mother’s birthday.
E-mails arrive hourly, like death threats. Paper-free memos fan across the agency in a gay electronic confetti of idiocy.
We told the client we had the power to turn back time.
This morning, the traffic manager blindsides me in the elevator. She is feral. If I squint just a little, she is a starved wolverine. She snarls and frets and talks about how we need final three-quarter-inch tape by the first. I am afraid and want to kill her with a stick. In a far-off corner of my mind I know I am in no real danger. In the animal kingdom I am superior, and she cannot hurt me. Her goal is to make me care about deadlines. Deadlines that the account people have created, absurd and garishly impossible Mad Hatter deadlines, deadlines that the account people have promised to the client.
And now they all converge in the halls about us; I can feel them. The wolverine, the producers, the account people with their traveling psychic fair, and the people from media. They are all oozing concern, manufacturing it constantly, in relentless shifts. They are ambulatory concern factories.
We made a bad mistake, Graham and I. We wrote a campaign that people understood. They will make sure that it is produced, now, to their exact specifications. And when it’s all over, if it is successful, the Creative Director from L.A. will take full credit for it. If it fails, he will distance himself from it.
It is a shameful occupation. We do it for the money.
More e-mails arrive on black poison-tipped arrows of circuitry. I hear the sound of them arriving, the gay little beep-beep that means the end of repose, of invisibility. I dare not open them all, yet the mailbox icon on my screen will blink like the timer on a hydrogen bomb until I do open them all. One by one.
It seems the media department has airdates for the campaign all arranged. They have Time bought. Now that Time has been bought and paid for, something must be placed into the Time. They will not go away until that Time is filled with an advertisement. Now that I grasp their terrible vision of the campaign, I am of course horrified that we ever thought of it in the first place. But it must be produced. Time has been bought. They will not consider thirty seconds of silent prayer to be a refreshing change of pace. My suggestion to have a homeless man recite Desiderata will not be considered.
I wonder why I needed to get here in the first place. Something about wanting to write something, anything, for a living. Something about being a creative, whatever that is. It all seems far, now that I’m in the forest of it. Now that I’m here, now that I see the trees themselves, I don’t know if I like the trees. They seem sinister.
Life says, Tough shit. Those are your trees.
I stare at Coit Tower a little harder, milking it for all it is worth.
Michael says that the unadvertised eighth law to spiritual success is Avoid confrontations within your own mind.
“Consciousness is a burden,” he says, imitating Deepak Chopra perfectly.
“If you think of your mind as a seething serpent, why would you walk toward it?”
It’s 3 a.m. A man just went down the street, past our flat and toward the housing projects, pinwheeling his arms and shouting, “If I see Jesus, I SOCK his ass.”
Christmas. Michael drove me to Point Bonita on his motorcycle, nestled in the Marin headlands, past the point where tourists dare to tread. An immaculate view of the Golden Gate Bridge, with wooden benches and sturdy BBQ grills. He was wearing the new Aerostitch motorcycle suit I gave him, which has black ballistic patches and counterintuitive zippers, and which cost seven hundred dollars.
“We could roast weenies,” he said, demonstrating the hinged posts the grills rest on, which can turn against the wind and shield themselves. “We could bring some Polish sausages,” he said, “and split open buns and toast them.”
We sat by ourselves and drank a bottle of Newcastle ale and ate the package of Turtles I put in his stocking. I gave him two and ate one.
I praised the newfound site. I have learned not to let talent go unrecognized.
“Just keep steering the conversation back to them,” is what my mother says. I will never liberate her and have almost stopped wanting to. Having survived the first quarter of my engagement, I now recognize her twenty-five-year marriage to my stepfath
er, Don, as something impossible and skilled, like spoon bending.
• • •
I had my first in-line roller-skating lesson today, on my new skates which Michael gave me for Christmas. He ran alongside, a human training wheel, as I slipped and slid my way down Presidio Street in front of our flat. We went back and forth, his hands clutched in mine.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “You can’t fall.”
I have the sense of going back in time, and correcting things.
January
Hanging and marriage, you know, go by Destiny.
GEORGE FARQUHAR
Reuben said yesterday that there was something vague about me. I came in and said I was fine and that things were fine and he said, “Yes, but there’s something.” Then he frowned at my head, as though looking for where the bolts went.
I relayed the fact that, in ten months and seventeen days, I would be married. I described how I find this fact pleasing, in the abstract.
“What’s alarming now,” I said to him, “is whenever I notice anything about Michael, I hear the striking of a Chinese gong and the words FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE echo through my head.”
“Like what?” he asked, far too interested.
“Like the way hair grows on his earlobes,” I said. I wished I could clearly see Reuben’s ears, but I couldn’t. We just weren’t ever going to get that close.
Then he said, “I notice that when you talk about your anxiety, you keep fiddling with your engagement ring.”
I’m like, Jesus, old man, give me a break.
I denied everything, of course. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there thinking, When are you going to tell him about ———, and then my mind says, Oh no. That would really be bad. You can’t tell him about how you and Michael have been sparring, how you sometimes look at him and he becomes a potato bug. You can’t tell him how terrified you are of keeping up at work with the twenty-year-olds named Ian, of the Creative Director from L.A., of getting fired and becoming a person with good shoes and a blanket over your shoulder who walks around cradling a Styrofoam cup of coffee. You can’t tell him that. That would make all of this real. It would make me a person with problems, who goes to see a therapist.
This goes on for the first forty-five minutes, then we work backward from there. By the last five minutes of the session I am talking very fast, like I’m doing speedballs. Talking about everything I’ve avoided. I can’t make much progress, so I spill my guts.
In the “Traditions” column of Modern Bride, it says that on your wedding day you’re supposed to have something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. The something old is supposed to be the garter from a happily married woman.
I know few happily married women. Those I do know don’t wear garter belts. I store this away as information.
I decide my something old will be the ring charm I pulled out of Michael’s friends Bill and Mia’s wedding cake during the period when Michael and I were in the final throes of the Commitment Wars. We went to four weddings last summer, while I waited in vain for Michael to voluntarily propose. By the last one I couldn’t breathe. A clubfoot, watching the women in white. Sobbing quietly and uncontrollably into Michael’s handkerchief.
“I always cry at weddings,” I said. Yes, but do you always hyperventilate? one may well have asked.
Mia had a white cake draped with tea roses, and inside were charms. I pulled one out, fastened onto a long white silk ribbon. It was a tiny engagement solitaire ring charm. I remember when I pulled it out of the cake, Mia, who looks like Deborah Kerr, said, “Don’t show it to Michael, he’ll have a stroke.”
I did show it to him, and he stared at it like a blind man.
Dusty called to tell me he is buying a three-ton Chevy truck.
I said, “What are you going to do with a three-ton truck in Manhattan?”
“Drive it around,” he says. He makes it sound like entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
“I have to fill the void,” he says. “The void is really huge today.”
I recognize that voice. It’s his manic voice.
“Don’t even think about another dog,” I say.
Dusty has had five dogs, all of whom he ended up giving away. He lives in a studio apartment on Third Avenue. He’s like a Satanist with those damn dogs.
“I’m on the other line with a credit broker,” he says. “I have to call you back.”
“No truck, Dusty,” I say. “I disallow it.”
“All right,” he says. He sounds gleeful. I know he is lying.
“Go buy some penny candy instead,” I say. “A big bag. Or, I know, go to Kmart.”
They have a Kmart in the East Village now. It’s doing blockbusters. Finally, people who live in New York City can get big jugs of Wisk.
“You can buy anything in Kmart,” I say.
“What does Michael say?” he asks. Hoping for the stray electoral vote. He needs California and Michigan.
“I’m with the penny candy,” Michael says.
“You guys are just perfect for each other,” Dusty says, disgusted.
“Promise me you won’t buy the truck,” I say.
“All right,” he says. “I love you. You’re always so right.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “I’m watching you.”
Received a memo today.
“… I want to ensure that we are casting visible Jamaicans and/or African-Americans in our advertising. My sense is that we don’t cast obviously diverse talent in adequate numbers.”
No more invisible people. Right.
The mistake is to read the memos, of course. It’s just a way that crazy people can touch you. You really have to be like Ram Dass, who keeps a picture of Jesse Helms right next to his maharaja on his puja table, and says, “It’s all perfect.”
Meanwhile I shored up my courage and cracked the January issue. I am seriously behind on my Modern Bride checklist. I have practically nothing checked off.
I can feel failure gathering in a fat cloud around my head. I know I could apply myself and do well, but I don’t see how it’s going to prepare me for real life.
We were on the couch and Michael was stroking my face and he said, “There have been two women in my life with beautiful eyebrows. One was the Wicked Queen in Snow White. The other is you.”
He went on to say that if the Wicked Queen were around today, the whole story might have been different, because she would have looked in her Magic Mirror and said, “If I got a little laser work around the jaw and eyelids, I might still be considered the Fairest in the Land.”
Michael and I attended his boss’s wedding last night. Seven hundred people, Grace Cathedral. It made the society page.
She wore Vera Wang, with the most wonderful satiny train and sculpted bow in back. It would have been better not to have seen this dress. This dress will do its best to ruin any dress I happen to end up with.
She glided down the aisle, which had long white tapered candles on the ends of all the pews. An angelic choir was singing into the high-ceilinged cathedral, which was draped with huge bouquets of French white tulips. We should definitely elope, I mused. Get the fuck out of Dodge.
The reception was at the Olympic Club. We waded through the sea of flat-faced white women with tiny noses and caved-in necks, holding aloft long flutes of Veuve Clicquot. In a side parlor, men smoked cigars with the satisfied expressions of sharks. Doorbell-like buttons lined the wall, to summon the expressionless Hispanic men who bore trays of fine brandy.
Willie Brown was there at the buffet, thronged by the flat-faced women. As I watched them fawn over him, I dipped a jumbo shrimp into blood-red sauce. I picked a pantied lamb chop off the buffet. There were whole roast beefs and turkeys, caviar, dim sum, two sushi bars, smoked salmon, dozens of pâtés. Pasta prepared as you waited, with a variety of sauces in silver boats.
“What’s going to happen to all of this later?” I asked Michael as he surveyed the cheese assortment. In its leering abundance it
looked not so much like food but nuclear waste. I wanted to make sure it would be properly disposed of.
Caterers, Michael explained, always give away food to the homeless shelters. He was eating a plate of thinly sliced Norwegian lox as he said this, with mini-bagels.
It was hard to imagine that the beluga would make its way to the Mission, to the man on the street with skin the color of yams. Hard to imagine how exactly the yam man would benefit from the raw-oyster bar.
We left early. An Ethiopian valet brought my car around, I gave him five dollars. What I should have done was given him my car, and then had him run us both over. Death to the hypocrites.
Today the Creative Director from L.A. came by to tell Graham and me that our television campaign had tested well in the initial focus groups, and would definitely be produced. He announced it dismissively, as though it were a prelude to something much, much bigger created by himself which he would at any moment reveal.
He was in my office for about five minutes, but wouldn’t sit down. He methodically picked up things from my desk, glanced at them, and put them down again. I offered him a chair. He declined, examining a stapler. He of course had probably never used a stapler. He had people to staple for him. As I started to rise, he ran out. I thought of how kings have to have their heads higher than everyone else’s.
When I left the building to go home, the Hostess pie and cake truck was out front, loading snack cakes into Kwick Mart. I looked to see if the driver was fat. He was.
Everyone is being their perfect selves.
I torture Michael when we’re watching television; I take my diamond ring off and place it on his baby finger or his little toe. I put it on the Cow’s tail. Michael hates this, so he finally grabs it away from me and jams it back on my ring finger.
This makes me feel like he’s asking me all over again. A feeling that time can slide backward and forward, that we can afford to dawdle.
Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 6