Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Suzanne Finnamore

  “He won’t go to counseling.” My mother tsks. She feels everyone should be in counseling, except for, of course, her own self. Then she says, “Cheryl was crying. She told me, ‘He says he doesn’t need counseling. He says I’m insensitive to his needs.’

  “A mirror and bananas?” my mother says, to her.

  As she tells me this, we both laugh. I have a flash of insight that this is what makes her marriage to my stepfather last. The laughing at what’s terrible.

  Don was a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor when my mother met him. They worked together at the Tribune; she was a proofreader and he ran the mailroom. My mother, Bea, was thirty-seven. My father had just left her for the fifth and apparently final time, to be with a sixteen-year-old-girl from Georgia named Pam who made great fritters. Don was just this very nice, quiet blond guy in the mailroom who was good with his hands, clever at fixing things. Nobody you’d notice from the surface, unless you were my mother and had been married for fourteen years to a charming, handsome man who’d never fixed anything except a drink.

  My mother asked Don to help her with some small tasks around the apartment where we lived after the divorce. One thing led to another, and before long they were married.

  “All I can remember is she asked me to hang some lamps” is how he tells it.

  I can hear the couple across the street yelling. They appear to loathe each other on a continual basis. They don’t break for holidays or Sundays; in fact they target those times as festivals of hatred. I look outside and see them chasing each other out of their duplex, their necks straining with contempt as they scream away in their Volvos. It really is winter now. The trees are bare, which is why I can see so well out my window.

  Upstairs, the crazy South African landlady and her husband have terrific rows. When she raises her voice she sounds like an angry cartoon crow. I feel doomed, surrounded by the bad marriages. It may be communicable, and they just don’t know it yet.

  This morning I planted primroses, which do well in a dark season. I placed them in small clay pots which the crazy South African landlady will undoubtedly move. She’s always creeping down from her lair, tiptoeing down the back steps and moving our things around back there. Rearranging our recycling, reversing the mops in the broom rack. Lining our Halloween pumpkin with aluminum foil. She’s pretty good at not getting caught.

  I’ll look out at dawn and see her hovering in a diaphanous nightgown and high-heeled marabou mules, totally nude underneath, pushing our birdbath across the deck.

  • • •

  It’s getting worse.

  There’s this monster that has come out. It could be nerves, cold feet, or delusion. All I know is, it’s progressive since the day we got engaged.

  It started over nothing. Literally nothing. We went to dinner before Don Giovanni.

  One minute we were being seated and the next minute we were drinking our wine and then he ordered veal and then I mentioned calf fattening pens and then without apparent segue he said something about how controlling and dominating I am and soon we weren’t talking. We were hissing.

  And then Michael looked around and said, “Everyone else is having a good time. We are the only ones like this. The only ones.”

  When did he become cruel, I wondered. Thinking of what to say next to hurt him.

  “Oh, so it’s my fault?” I said. “You are so passive aggressive,” I said, smiling. So that others wouldn’t know we were fighting.

  “God you’re a bitch,” he said.

  “And you are an asshole,” I said. Enunciating every syllable separately.

  The waiter came. “Is everything all right?”

  “Great,” we said, in unison.

  Once outside the restaurant, I announced, “You go to the opera alone, I’m taking the car.”

  “How will I get home?” he said.

  “Take a cab,” I said. We were standing next to an ATM, which gave this suggestion extra weight. I walked over to it and withdrew forty dollars. I pressed the buttons for Quick Cash. I shoved the money at him along with the ring, which I had removed in my fury. When he turned to go, I suddenly felt appalled, as though obedience were the real crime. I started to cry.

  “I don’t want to go alone,” I said to his back.

  This drives the monster away. Truth.

  Michael turned around, a disgusted relief on his face.

  “Give me back the ring,” I said. I couldn’t breathe.

  He handed it back. It means more now, the ring. It has attached itself to my lungs.

  The opera, then. We just endured, for three and a half hours. Don Giovanni is completely without joy. A story about a motherfucker, it seems to me now. The only good part is when the chasm of doom opens up and he falls in. And when after the third act, Michael asked, “Can we go home now?” I said, “No.” Glaring at him in my strapless gown.

  The monster was back. And the monster wanted to stay. The monster loves opera, it turns out. The longer and more lackluster, the better.

  Eventually it was over and we trundled home, exhausted and bitter.

  Now I’m thinking Michael looked handsome. The restaurant was lovely, with gold walls. We sat in the Dress Circle. I would like a do-over, but this is not possible, except in miniature golf.

  Valentine’s Day, a truce. We had lunch at Zuni Café and then went to Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park. The swans were unnaturally beautiful. They mate for life.

  I wish they could talk. I have questions.

  • • •

  I tell Reuben about the arguments. I also say that we have a lot of good times too, attending the National Cat Show and making fun of trainers, or scrambling eggs together in the middle of the night to the strains of Stan Getz. I tell him that I still want to marry Michael, how at the core and even in the worst of moments, I never stop loving him or feeling safe with him. I say that I know he loves me and that we met for a reason, but that we’re in some sort of sudden unexplained shit blizzard.

  I confess to Reuben how sad I feel that Michael and I are not paralleling the engaged couple in the print ad for Tiffany’s, all dressed up and twenty and hugging so tight you couldn’t slide a pencil in between. These days we more closely resemble two morbid grouchy orangutans in a small cage at a testing facility.

  My mother and Don drove up from Carmel and we all went to Sunday brunch at Mel’s Diner on Lombard Street. My mother is glad we live here because it means she gets to get away from the small-tourist-town atmosphere of Carmel and into the slightly-bigger-tourist-town atmosphere of San Francisco. Michael’s mother, Ilene, still prefers Brooklyn, as she did when she was married. Michael’s father died of a heart attack when Michael was six, but she stayed on.

  My mother and I got into a fight because they were an hour late. My mother and I have only had about ten fights our whole lives. Michael tried to smooth it over. He can’t stand family conflict of any kind. Finding your father dead in the kitchen at six will do that for a boy.

  We all ate pancakes and then they left and Michael and I watched The X-Files.

  We don’t talk lately. We eat dinner in front of the television.

  Michael slept the entire night on the couch Monday night. Another first.

  I made fun of the movie he was watching, The Third Man. I spoke during some windy dialogue, and he said, “Shut up.”

  “It’s just a movie,” I said. Actually I think what I said was, “It’s just a stupid movie.”

  Then he called me a cunt. I had never heard him use that word. I wondered what else was inside of him that he had not used.

  I stared at him like he had grown horns.

  This is not the man I met, I thought. This is some other man, doing a hateful yet incredibly skillful rendition of the man I met. A shape-shifter.

  He went out with his friends and didn’t come home until twelve-thirty. When he did, he glared at me like I was an erroneous bill, and went to sleep on the couch.

  “GOOD,” I shouted.

  This morning M
ichael said he didn’t know if he wanted to marry me.

  I said, “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m serious.” He looked terrified.

  “You don’t want to marry me,” I repeated. Maybe I had just heard him wrong. Now would be a good time for him to say so. I heard my voice go high and squeaky.

  “Don’t you love me anymore?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Is there someone else?” I asked.

  We are reading directly from the script. It protects me, I think, from going completely insane. The script is good for that.

  “No,” he said.

  He is lucky he said this. If he had said, Yes, there is someone else, I would have killed him; I’m not sure how. Or I would have torn all my hair out. Something.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You’re sorry,” I said.

  I weep and rock on the bed, grabbing on to the headboard. It is as if I am on a ship that has started to list. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t stroke my head like he normally does when I cry. He sits on his side of the bed and looks wooden. A sad forty-four-year-old Pinocchio.

  After a long time I stop crying and just wander around the apartment. I am looking for something, exactly what is unclear. I will know it when I find it.

  I walk back into the bedroom. He is still in the exact same position.

  Strange calm.

  “Why aren’t you mad?” he asks.

  “I’m not mad because this isn’t happening,” I say.

  I stayed home from work, calling in sick.

  At six, Michael came home. I was terrified he wouldn’t. For the first time since I have known him, I wait at the window, watching for his white Honda sedan.

  He says, “I’m afraid that we won’t make it.”

  I stare at the fire in the fireplace. I can’t seem to look away.

  “Things are bad,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. The monster has won. All hail the monster.

  “I know how divorce is,” he said. “What if we have children and then it doesn’t work?” he says. “You don’t know how terrible it is.”

  “That is not going to happen,” I say. Dragging my eyes away from the flames.

  I believe it. I will make him believe it. If necessary I will hypnotize him.

  “We are meant to be together,” I say.

  He says nothing. We hug awkwardly, like strangers. He does not kiss me.

  I feel like someone has taken my life away.

  I talked to Reuben on the phone. I stopped every minute or so to cry. He waited in complete silence, as though a plane were passing overhead.

  “This is a dark time,” he said. “But Michael’s a pretty solid citizen. My sense is that you two will get through it.”

  “What makes you think so?” I said. How do it know, as the joke goes.

  “I just know,” he said. “And I know something else, Eve.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “There will be more dark times, after you’re married,” he said.

  “Gee. Thanks a lot,” I said. Nostradamus of Marin County.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  Then he gave me his home phone number.

  I can’t stand being here in the apartment while Michael is undecided. I need to retrench.

  I am going to go to Bea’s house in Carmel, two hundred miles away. I am going home to mother. And we aren’t even married yet.

  Once again I have managed to reach original and staggering new lows.

  My mother sets me up in the spare room. All I can do is go flat and cry. A big failure, a big zero. A weeping eye.

  I cannot imagine my life without Michael. I cannot imagine not getting married, now. I honestly feel I would have to leave the country.

  For dinner, she brings me a small round plate of boneless skinless chicken stir-fry with rice. I look at it. It makes me sick. I can’t stand the smell.

  She is trying to give me something she thinks I will like. They would usually fry the chicken and mash potatoes with butter. They never cook this way. It makes me sadder, if such a thing is possible.

  She says I have to eat. But I don’t. I don’t have to eat. No one does. Look at the magazines, I want to tell her.

  My stomach is perfectly flat. I get a small pleasure from this. Maybe if I get thin enough, he will marry me.

  I take four Excedrin P.M.’s and a cup of Kahlua and crawl into the sofa bed.

  Michael now seems like a beautiful tropical island that I have been expelled from. I have forgotten all his faults and remember only his good side. Over and over again I remember how sweet he was at Mel’s. How he made sure the waitress put the butter and syrup on the side, the way I like it. It was only two weeks ago. We had pancakes. Surely no one who is going to break up eats pancakes together with his fiancée’s mother and her husband in a restaurant that plays fifties music on individual booth jukeboxes that still take a quarter for three plays. He even gave me a quarter. I don’t remember what songs I played, which seems suddenly important. Had I played different songs, we’d still be together. What I believe is that any small detail once changed would revert us to normal.

  I stare at my left eye in the mirror, at the irreversible tissue damage. Maybe it is working its dark charm. Perhaps everything that had seemed to be going my way will now begin to reverse. In the end I’ll be back with the semiprofessional basketball player, still a secretary, still the sad Spanky and Our Gang puppy with the black eye. I’ll have taken to wearing long-sleeved blouses and dark glasses everywhere. We’ll pass Michael on the street, but he won’t recognize me in my huge dark glasses. He’ll be back with Gabrielle; she’ll look stunning and will have my ring on. It all seems possible. I’ll die a spinster, a gaggle of cats sniffing my bloated corpse.

  I think about suicide. Not the act of it, I know I can’t do that. That would entail action, of which I am incapable. But I lie and close my eyes and concentrate on the blackness. What I would like is not to exist, not to feel. To cease.

  At 3 a.m. I wake up and think, This is ridiculous.

  I throw on my clothes and barrel home in the pitch black amid truckers on the freeway. They are all going eighty. I go eighty-five. One tries to run me out of the fast lane. I roll down my window and flip him off.

  I get home around dawn. I slide my key into the lock. I feel like a burglar.

  What if he isn’t there? whispers the monster.

  But he is. He is twisted up in the sheets, a glass of seltzer by the bed. His face is white.

  “I have a migraine,” he says.

  I drop my clothes and get into bed. We lie side by side, naked and holding hands. Then I rub his temples until his migraine goes away.

  I can do that.

  Today we went to the Sausalito art fair, and I saw a ceramic bowl with a toaster and the word HOME painted on it. Michael bought it for me. Driving home, twice I start to ask him if we are still getting married. But I am afraid. I feel like we’re walking over a drawbridge made of dental floss.

  Later we are in the kitchen. I walk to the table, sift through the mail. There is a bill from Modern Bride for my subscription.

  I put in on top of the pile. I wait until he turns around and then I say, “Oh. My bill from Modern Bride came.”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, looking straight at me.

  Then he asks me if I want spaghetti for dinner. He is tying on an apron.

  “Yes,” I say. He turns back toward the stove. I touch the bill. It is pink, with black writing.

  I sit down, write a check for twenty dollars, and seal the envelope.

  Tonight Michael came home from working late and went straight to bed without brushing his teeth or checking the answering machine. He crawled into bed, waking me as his belt hit the floor, and he peeled his clothes off, kissing me at the same time as he threw his watch onto the nightstand and tore the strap of my nightgown lifting it over my head.

  Afterward we both said I love you
about ten times.

  March

  You’re either on the bus or off the bus.

  KEN KESEY

  Graham decided he won’t be my partner anymore. He’s leaving advertising to tour the country in his lime-green convertible and film a documentary about street people. We’ve been together five years. He was telling the Creative Director from L.A. how he was leaving the agency, and I happened to be upstairs, walking by. That’s how I found out.

  I feel shocked. The wife who has been left while the husband goes off to find himself as she stays behind with two-year-olds and chocolate-smeared walls and ratty hair. The last to know. As I grow older, all the clichés come crackling to life.

  So much for my trainer marriage.

  Stayed home and cried for two days. Thank God for Michael.

  He is all that matters, I’m finding out. Interesting.

  • • •

  This morning the Creative Director from L.A. called me into his office. He took me aside, empathy on his face. He pulled his chair up next to mine, and slowly put on his Giorgio Armani glasses. As though he were a kindly father, about to read aloud to me.

  He said, “Obviously, you’re not leaving.”

  I inched my chair a little bit away from him.

  “I don’t think that’s obvious at all,” I said.

  He waved his hand at the air, dismissive. Brushed his long blond hair back from his forehead. “We’re going to be making you a group head, of course. That’s all been taken care of.…”

  I thought about how lonely and sad it was going to be without Graham. I opened my mouth and said, “Partner.”

  “Partner?” The Creative Director from L.A. blinked a little blink. There are only nine of those, even though the name of the agency is Silverbaum and Partners.

  “Yes.” I look out his huge bay-view window. I think of Graham’s little sliver of a window.

  “I think that would really make me happy,” I said. Still looking out the window.

  And that is how I became a partner.