At 6 a.m. the alarm went off, on my side of the bed. I told Michael that I was taking a day trip to L.A. to attend the final focus groups for the new campaign: what Graham calls the Fuck Us Groups. This is where, for fifty dollars apiece, people from all walks of life sit around eating free sandwiches and ripping the wings off the advertising we have created.
“I’m leaving for L.A.,” I said.
Michael scowled, flopped over, and said, “You have to tell me the day before.”
“Why?” I said.
“I need to prepare for your flying. I need to fly the plane with my mind.”
I hear myself agreeing to this.
Back home, a Saturday. I went to my childhood friend Yvonne’s baby shower in Pacific Heights. Immediately upon arrival I was cornered by a petite blond woman from Yvonne’s office who’d just left her husband. When she heard I was engaged, she explained to me, in detail, how love dies. Smiling and hovering like Tinkerbell, she described how one day she just woke up and realized she didn’t love her husband anymore. Her two-year-old son, she said, is living with her in Mill Valley.
Then she said I should read The Road Less Traveled.
Eventually I was saved by the appearance of an eggplant frittata. I moved toward it. I told her it was very nice to meet her. And thank you for killing my buzz.
I left early, making up a lie for the room. Yvonne understood, knowing my history of mental illness.
I walked alone down Washington Street. The maids were all leaving the Broadway mansions, walking to the bus stops, to crinkled American cars that don’t fit in.
I hate showers. All those women in one place. Terrifying.
I wonder whom I can convince to throw me one.
I tell Reuben about the dream I had, where the back of my wedding dress has a big hole in the rear.
He said, “How did that make you feel?”
“Exposed,” I said.
He nods, and says, “When the Navajo weave their blankets, they put a mistake in every one. Because nothing is perfect.
“A very smart people,” he concludes, putting his feet up on a hassock, and crossing them at the ankles.
At work the person in the office next to me has been made a partner. His commercials consistently feature pouty-lipped Asian girls in midriff tops and lean yet muscular men with lizard eyes just like his.
We started at the same time, in this agency. Like, the same month.
And when I pass him in his new giant-sized office, with a wet bar and a black marble shower, I have to fucking congratulate him.
Last night I made Oprah’s unfried spa recipe chicken. I have to make it every two weeks now. Michael insists. He feels it’s part of his compensation package.
The addition of hot mango chutney made it even more diabolical. We each ate about five pieces.
I am no longer losing weight.
They had a catered cocktail party for the lizard man. Inside his new top-floor corner office is all-new furniture from Lim. The chairs have soft, faux zebra backs. One of those really expensive desks with the black trip wire and no drawers.
I comfort myself with the conviction that he is probably, way down deep inside, profoundly unhappy. I tell myself that he is secretly terrified, just skating on his luck. Because he knows that others possess a higher sense of originality and style, even though he is doing way better careerwise and everyone in the Fuck Us Groups seems to love his work. On the surface.
I drink a single glass of champagne. I smile, feeling the burn. I can’t get over the fact that the lizard man is winning.
It’s the Chinese who say, Envy is an insult to the self.
I told Reuben how I wanted a raise and a promotion, how everybody is passing me on the ladder and how upset that makes me. I admitted that I was obsessed with ambition and money and getting recognized by the agency, how I wanted it all now. The desk with no drawers, everything.
Reuben crossed his long legs. Then he said, “You’re spending all your time tending the outer garden, when what you need to do is tend the inner garden.”
As for the raise and the recognition, he said that he felt all of that would probably happen. He waved his hands with a bored expression. Then he leaned forward and said, “But believing in yourself … that’s the alchemist’s gold.”
He held up one bony finger like Merlin when he said it.
I woke up today to a feeling of movement in my veins. I decided I had to confront my boss. I decided I didn’t care about the alchemist’s gold. I’ll get the false gold and then I’ll U-turn back and get the alchemist’s gold.
We went into the Creative Director from L.A.’s palatial office, Graham and I. The Creative Director from L.A. demanded to know why we felt we deserved more money. He stood up when he asked this. The Creative Director from L.A. is, naturally, quite tall. He stood up and looked out his office window. His huge, 360-degree bay-view window.
Then Graham mentioned the solicitous phone calls from other agencies we have been getting. The headhunters from New York.
At the mention of headhunters, he turned around. His face softened. His head tilted slightly forward; he donned the mask of someone who is listening, with regularly spaced meaningful nods. His eyes hooded over as he calculated how little he could get away with giving us.
I said, “Do we really have to go to New York to get what we deserve?”
I improvised, borrowing from movies I had seen where Jimmy Cagney rises up to conquer the world. Headhunters from New York became a key phrase in my speech, because, as the Creative Director from L.A. knows, perhaps one or two of the agencies there might like to steal us away, Graham and me. Soon he leaned across his oversized desk and said, “No, of course not, you’re not going to New York.”
If necessary, his flat black eyes suggested, we would be hobbled.
Now I feel soiled. This is how he got to be the Creative Director from L.A. With skillful ease he downplayed our successes, laid claim to our work, and undermined what shred of self-esteem we had managed to hold on to. God you have to love life.
I find myself getting back to basics, emotionally. Just wishing he would go away. Struck by a large Muni bus, and then maybe dragged for a time. This makes me know how unevolved I am, and why I am being visited by this sort of karma. Additionally I’ve discovered that whenever you pray for someone to go away, the next one is worse.
Graham is my protector, the one who sits by me and says the hard things. He is the first man I ever had a true partnership with, before Michael. Although he is gay, I think of him as my trainer marriage.
As for the job, we actually have no other firm offers. There is no New York.
One of the managers in Michael’s office is getting married in June, on Martha’s Vineyard.
She woke up her fiancé the other night at 3 a.m. and told him that she felt she was making a mistake getting married. She said that, although she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, she felt he was kind of an asshole. And that she had been seriously thinking of calling her ex-boyfriend and going to see him. Her fiancé told her to go to sleep and that they would talk about it in the morning.
They are still engaged.
February
I do desire we may be better strangers.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AS YOU LIKE IT
We’re in an interesting period of growth. The relentlessly booming Chinese gong is creating increased paranoia and friction. Little things matter more now, because of the long-term implications of marriage. In fact, let me rephrase that: there are no little things.
Today Michael and I disagreed over whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher. At the top of our lungs. I went outside and climbed in my car. I was gunning it halfway down the block when I realized I had no place to go. I felt remiss for allowing people to grow up, get married, and move away.
There was a fantasy that the moment we got engaged, we would be invariably happy. That all the conflict we had up until this time had been about commitment, and that along with the commi
tment would come contentment. But lately I feel fatigued and resentful. I consider how I labored to put on this Great Woman act so he would ask me to marry him. For eighteen months he parried and stalled and danced around the maypole of matrimony. For eighteen months I was patient and dressed provocatively and entertained his friends and listened to him go on about Cormac McCarthy, and about how he wished he lived in the forties so he could wear hats every day.
For eighteen months I made him soup and rubbed his neck and performed really sincere fellatio, and now I’m tired. There’s this backlash of confusion, now that it’s finalized. Like, why did I have to do all this? And, given our respective ages, what took him so long? And even, sometimes, why did I want this? I’ve won, but what have I won?
The truth is that now that I’ve secured him, I feel I can really tear ass.
Also, whenever I bring up the wedding, Michael changes the subject. He lets me know this is not something he wants to discuss. I say “wedding” and right away he says “Uh-huh …” and gazes off into the middle distance. Not interested.
This is how he keeps change from happening, I see. He doesn’t participate beyond the minimum. He bought the ring, almost dutifully it seems now. Establishing a price, following through, the insurance. But that’s it.
It’s as though he asked me and then ran back into his fort. As though asking me depleted all his energy, and nothing more can be expected of him for a long time.
I’m noticing some other disturbing qualities.
He has a habit of chewing with his mouth partially open when he’s tired. He wears his cap half cocked on his head, like Forrest Gump. And he always has toothpaste on his tee shirt when he comes to bed at night. He seems to have difficulty keeping things in his mouth. It is completely horrifying, and I am going to marry this man. Funny how those two elements can exist side by side. Assuming they can.
Last night there was a row because I wanted to eat in the dining room and he wanted to eat in the kitchen. He started yelling at me and I took off the ring and said, I’m not marrying you if you yell at me, because the semiprofessional basketball player used to yell at me and then try to strangle me, and now I can’t stand to be yelled at. Michael made a small mean mouth and, before he stormed out the door to the corner bar, he turned around and said, very quietly, “Eve? You probably drove him to it.…” And that’s when the red lights started flashing.
At around nine he came back and made up the couch for himself, at my request. When I went to bed, I retrieved him from the couch. This means, I suppose, that I still love him.
The semiprofessional basketball player was the worst mistake I ever made, but it is also the time in my life when I learned the most. I’ve heard the human brain will automatically block out unpleasant or traumatic events, but I don’t find this to be the case. I remember it crisply, from beginning to end.
I had heard of him for years before we met; he was a minor jock celebrity at a different local high school we heard stories about. The urban, flat-ground school. I had heard from mutual friends how arrogant and difficult he was, even violent. He had, according to rumor, actually turned down the office of Homecoming King.
When I finally met him we had long graduated out of high school; it was at a Halloween party. He was tall and rangy and good-looking in a baleful, shiny way. He looked like a freshly oiled gun. He appeared as if no one would trifle with him, no woman mold him. His mouth was baby soft, curled into a small derisive O. His deep-set brown eyes were the soundless barrel of the gun.
The gauntlet had been thrown. I decided I would be the one to change him. Imagine how many women who decide this very same thing end up with tags on their toes and surprised expressions, two white marble irises looking up at a stranger in a mortician coat who doesn’t care, who if anything feels mild disgust: another domestic dispute gone bad. Someone weak, is perhaps what they are thinking as they tidy up the body. Dumb unlucky broad. And you’re dead by then; you can’t answer back. You can’t describe what happened, that it wasn’t your fault, you had no idea it would escalate so dramatically. You can’t explain how wrong this is for you, in particular. You can’t tell him your verbal SAT scores. You dead, sugar. You kilt.
I was lucky. He laid hands on me many times, but the semiprofessional basketball player never killed me.
Why did I stay with him, is the question everyone asks.
I stayed with him because it didn’t start out that way. For a long time, I stayed with him for the beginning.
In the beginning he was an asshole in a sexy, powerful way. He smoked in bed, drove too fast. After a period of feeling dead, of grieving for my father and Leigh, he made me feel alive. He took me out to karaoke bars and sushi dinners, to semiprofessional basketball games and award ceremonies. He made me feel powerful in our little athletic-event-fabricated world, second only, of course, to him. When we walked into a room, heads turned. I stayed with him because of the turning heads.
Then one night he pushed me down behind a restaurant because I told him to calm down; I was wearing new boots and they ripped. He had them repaired.
A few weeks later, I was driving us home from a party because he’d had too much to drink. He accused me of being a manipulative bitch and backhanded the side of my head with a closed fist. I was driving on the freeway when he did this.
The next day I had a purple semicircle behind my right ear. I had long hair at the time; I brushed it forward over the ears. I remember it was most important that no one else know about it. My own well-being seemed a distant second to that consideration. Then the next day the glassy, soothing calm as I cried and he apologized, swore it would never happen again. This began the cycle. Everything one reads in dime novels and helpful pamphlets. Yet inconceivably, it was happening to me, a college graduate. Not even a state college, a university.
By then, my self-esteem was one notch below sewer fly. I took full blame for the situation. I strapped it on like a lead vest. I felt so ashamed, I couldn’t move. Literally.
By that time we were living together, in his house. Breaking up would have meant packing my belongings into boxes, arranging for a van, and moving out, leaving what had become my home. All of which required action, deliberation, assertiveness. I had lost all of that in the brawl. I had become what he, during our increasingly frequent arguments, had named me: fucking useless bitch.
At that time I was a secretary, making a small salary. I had to get together the first and last months’ rent plus security deposit before I could find my own place. So there I was watching the cycle escalate as I tried to scrape up moving money, and he was trying to stop my breathing.
Later I discovered that the primary reason women stay is not always, as many people believe, due to psychological factors. It is often about money. And yet, judiciously, not just the poor and uneducated, but the erudite and the rich. We are all free to crouch in closets, back braced against the door. The fulcrum, the commonality that exists across the board: our blanket dependence on men to get by, to feel good.
I had not changed the semiprofessional basketball player. I had only made him more of what he was. A boy whose own father had held him upside down out of an open twelve-story window when he was three.
After two years together he gave me a black eye while coming down off a cocaine spree. He rolled in at 5 a.m., the tires on his Jeep emitting a short scream in the driveway. I was waiting up for him on the couch, worrying. I told him how terribly he was acting, and this enraged him. I remember how his fist suddenly arced into the air, as if on its own volition, like in The Hand. “I’ll kill you” is what he said.
“Why?” I asked, falling, kneeling on the floor like a devotee. Why will you kill me?
I still don’t know. Would like to call him on the telephone and ask him, but won’t. Still the visceral sense of having gotten away.
That morning as I looked in the mirror, my life surged up to meet me. I could not camouflage this mark, it was not blue but really black and wound a circle around my whole
left cheek and eye socket. I looked like the sad puppy in Spanky and Our Gang. There was no way to cover it up, to pretend it had not happened. If there had been a way, I would have.
The next day I moved into my mother’s house. She never mentioned the eye.
There exists a sac of skin that distends when I’m tired, beneath my left eye. Irreversible tissue damage. Something stretched too far, which has come back changed. I’ve thought of having it surgically corrected. Michael swears it’s unnoticeable, the tiny pouch of loose skin. Yet not long ago, seeing me stare critically into a mirror one morning after a late night, he offered to pay to have it removed with lasers.
I declined. I didn’t tell him that I need it, in some perverse way. A reminder that you can never, for any reason or length of time, no matter how much you love or believe you love, change someone.
That believing you can might end you.
My mother calls me at work, with news about her girlfriend Cheryl who works at Otis elevators.
“Cheryl’s fourth marriage is breaking up,” she reports.
“Why?” I ask. I need to know these things now.
“She moved a mirror in the bathroom and he won’t talk to her.”
I express interest.
“He just leaves notes. It’s been nine days this time. The last time was seven days.”
“What was the last time for?” I ask. I know she will know.
“The last time was for forgetting the bananas.
“I never liked him,” she adds. “There was something wrong with his face.”
I wait to see if she will tell me what was wrong with his face. She doesn’t.
“I feel so bad for her. She said to me, ‘Bea. This is my fourth marriage. How could I be so stupid?’ ”
I think, How easy, to be stupid. How almost mandatory. The more divorces I had, the more I’d need to try again. Like Scratch ’n Win.
Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 7