Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Suzanne Finnamore

  • • •

  Yesterday there was a company-wide electronic memo about me. I was formally promoted. So it’s official, although I wouldn’t be surprised to be led into an empty garage and be shot in the back of the head like Joe Pesci in a Scorsese film.

  Reading the e-mail, I felt almost nothing. I was frankly expecting it to usher in a new phase of personal power and self-esteem.

  Today people at work have been stopping by my office to congratulate me. John Hoberger, a veteran agency producer whom we secretly call The Hoe, said, “You know what it is? It’s respect.” Then he said, “You deserve it.”

  I have to admit, that felt pretty good.

  No one has figured out that I am an impostor yet. Only a matter of time before they find out. Then this whole charade will be over, thank God.

  Last night in my mind I formed MAJM: Middle-Aged Jewish Men, a support group for middle-aged Jewish men and their non-Jewish partners. The former would have a forum in which to gripe about HMOs and the way the airlines are run and how you can’t find anything good except in New York. They could renew their vows never to buy retail unless completely unavoidable, and then afterward, we of the shiksa would also have a chance to share experiences and touch base with our own kind, eating things with mayonnaise and acting carefree. Sticking forks into toasters and improperly hanging pictures.

  When I met Michael I was thrilled to be finding a MAJM. But I didn’t know the whole story then. I only knew him as good MAJM, the wise funny great cook with the sexy reading glasses who genuinely likes women and understands fabric. The MAJM who won’t let you buy second best, what he dismisses with a wave and the magical word chazzerai. I wanted the sophisticated MAJM, the well-dressed breezy professional New York Times MAJM. I honestly thought that’s what I was getting. Not the neurotic madman who stalks salmonella, who has to rush home if there’s a raw tomato in the car.

  Sometimes I just want to say, “Wait a minute. I didn’t order all this.”

  “It comes with,” the representative from MAJM would explain.

  There was a hummingbird outside our window, so we watched it for a while. Michael had just brought me my coffee. He has done this since the beginning. He used to fix me toast or breakfast, too. We are down to just coffee.

  “Hummingbirds,” he tells me, “have the fastest heartbeat of any living thing.”

  My heartbeat is slow, and his is rapid. Michael said, “You’re a tortoise, and I’m a hummingbird.”

  We are running out of things to talk about. I knew it would happen, I just thought it would be later.

  Went to an awards luncheon in Hollywood today. The Creative Director from L.A. flew down on the same plane, though not in coach. Not even for fifty minutes would he experience coach. Coach is for others, those who have not had the necessary brilliance and cunning to become a Creative Director from L.A. Coach is for those who did not cut their teeth working for top creative agencies in Portland, Oregon, and then being begged to stay. Begged.

  At the Four Seasons where the luncheon was held, he sat across from me eating a huge pile of soba noodles. He forked them into his mouth and talked about the ridiculous nature of award shows, how they’re all fixed and run by New York has-beens. His noodles looked like worms on a plate. He shoveled them in, sucking noisily as they whipped past his lips. Famous people, his manner implied, may eat as they like.

  While he spoke to the other creative directors about the unfairness of the judging, noodles fell down the front of his shirt, to which he had the foresight to attach what looked like the edge of the tablecloth. I watched, mesmerized. More and more I feel totally detached from everything, and am surprised to hear people speak to me and ask for things.

  My radio commercial is up for an award. It won’t win, because I care.

  I asked Michael late last night if we could forget the wedding and just do city hall, and after some initial surprise, he said OK, fine.

  But then I thought about seeing Lana and Yvonne and Ray and Dusty and Beth and everybody and I decided I wanted one anyway. A small one, a casual one. I just want to show up, like a party. So over breakfast this morning I told him I had changed my mind, that we should have the wedding.

  Now whenever I bring up the wedding, Michael narrows his eyes into slits and nods at every suggestion, as though he is biding his time until the attendants arrive with my Thorazine shot.

  This morning at dawn as she was stealing our newspaper, the crazy South African landlady stepped in a big yellow runny dog turd on the sidewalk in front of our building. I looked out the bedroom blinds and she was hopping around on one foot dressed in a Christian Dior pantsuit and a sequined hairnet, mad as hell. It was like Halloween and Christmas all rolled into one.

  Later, Michael calls my office from Union Square, where he has just purchased a headset for his new StarTac cellular telephone. He tells me how great it is that he can walk down the street with his hands free, talking on the phone with nothing but small undetectable earphones in his ears. I imagine him walking down O’Farrell, talking animatedly with his hands in his pockets.

  “People will think you’re a paranoid schizophrenic,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says pleasantly.

  I go to see Reuben. I tell him how I am struggling with the wedding plans. How it seems too overwhelming and time-consuming to even begin.

  He tells me the golf story.

  “I decided I was going to learn golf. I was a pretty athletic guy, in those days. I had my own practice in Pebble Beach; there was a golf course within a few miles. I bought a whole set of customized clubs, with special handles, designed for my height and weight. Then I hired a golf pro to tutor me.

  “On our first lesson, we go to the driving range and I begin to swing with all my might. I am going to hit that ball as hard as I can, which I know is pretty hard. I miss every ball in the bucket. Finally I get down to the last ball, and I’m mortified. I just want to get it over with, so without even looking I swing, and it connects, and sails three hundred yards, perfectly straight ahead. My golf instructor was so amazed he held the sides of his head and fell to the ground.

  “Just a nice easy swing …,” Reuben murmurs. Then he says, “I never hit another golf ball.”

  This seems to me to be another story, but he stops there.

  I am the last one to get married, of the tight ring we formed as girls. Yvonne, Lana, and I. We made a bet one night in 1981, sitting downstairs at Larry Blake’s in Berkeley drinking kamikazes, that whoever was the last to get married would be owed something. A consolation prize, although to us it was viewed as a reward.

  Yvonne married first, an overachiever. She was the only one of us to marry before age thirty. Eight years later at age thirty-seven came Lana, the rebel, who married Raul a year after giving birth to Isabel.

  I will bring up the rear, a scant ten months past Lana. The dark horse, I win. Though now I don’t remember what I win.

  I am hurrying down Sacramento Street to my dentist’s office and from a distance I see this tall well-built Greek man that I used to work with when I was a secretary, and that I slept with a few times. He was married to an ice-skater named Dawn. I had just been jilted after a long affair with a devastating Indian man who went back to his old girlfriend who was also from India. The Greek man helped me get over this, in my apartment during lunch. His wife, he said, was away a lot at ice-skating exhibitions. Removing his clothes and folding them carefully on my bedroom chair he admitted to me that, though he loved her, she did not begin to fathom his complexities.

  Although I recognize the tall Greek right away I pretend not to see him, and he pretends not to see me. We walk right by each other, close enough to touch.

  In a true universe, I would say, “Still cheating on your wife?” And he would reply, “Still fucking married men?”

  Instead we pass each other silently. Cowards and charlatans, unite.

  Michael went to return a video tonight, around ten. The place on Lyon, near the projects. As
he pushed the door open, the store’s guard dog came racing toward him. At the last moment, he closed the door again, and stepped back as the dog went crazy inside.

  They had just closed, but had forgotten to draw the latch on the door.

  When he comes back, he tells me what happened. He is out of breath from hurrying back to tell me.

  I hug him tight, especially his head, which is the most important part of him. He buries his head in my neck, and closes his eyes.

  I will kill anyone who hurts him.

  • • •

  Someone saw Graham today and was telling me how great he was doing, and I experienced what my friend Jill calls a Grand Klong: a sudden rush of shit to the heart.

  “A Grand Klong is when you look in your rearview mirror and you see the police car,” Jill says. “And then there’s a Petit Klong.

  “A Petit Klong is where you’re talking about somebody and they arrive, but they have not heard their name.”

  Nothing had better happen to Jill, is all I have to say. Because now with Graham gone, I’m down to my last crazy person.

  Meanwhile, I am going to look for my wedding dress tomorrow. Reuben said I shouldn’t go alone, but Lana is in New Mexico and I can’t ask Beth, whose marriage is in the implosion process. Yvonne just had a baby, so she never goes anywhere.

  Reuben said that when I go to get my dress, I should pay a lot of attention to what comes up.

  “This is a time for deep emotions,” he said. “Don’t try to be a warrior.”

  I found my wedding dress. At a small boutique in Palo Alto, which specializes in dresses made at the turn of the century. The place where we’re getting married is a Victorian mansion in Sausalito. A theme has emerged, seemingly on its own.

  The woman at the shop was round and pretty, with long brown hair and brown eyes. Fiona. I instantly wanted to be in her kitchen, drinking tea and exchanging confidences while she pulled cake tins out of her oven.

  She tells me her life story. An expert, she has been married several times. Once for five weeks, once for five years, and once for six days.

  “It was the six-day one that really got me,” she says. Fiona left him after six days, because of the prenuptial agreement he had drafted. At the last second before signing it, she lifted up the top sheet and on the underneath carbon copy there was a clause. A clause he had written in, entitling him to her house and property.

  “Something made me lift it up.” She frowns and looks sharply out the shop window, as if he might be coming up the walk right now, with more falsified documents.

  Her current marriage is in its sixth year. “He’s my best friend,” she says.

  I am your new best friend, I don’t say.

  As we talk I dig for details unself-consciously. I feel I have a right. I want to know why she didn’t get an annulment to the six-day marriage. She said it was because they did it in Vegas, so it was a final sale.

  She helps me on and off with the dresses, smoothing the slips and straightening hems. In the back of my mind I am aware that she reminds me uncannily of Leigh, the spare mother I lost.

  I keep talking myself out of the resemblance.

  I try on a lot of dresses which make me look like a miscast chambermaid. A very well-dressed Victorian woman, about to go to bed.

  And then I try on the Dress, a knotted-French-linen lace sheath, the color of milky tea. I look in the mirror and I see a woman from 1910, with my face, who coincidentally is also about to be married. I turn around. The Leigh-Fiona woman looks on, but something is wrong. Something is missing.

  “I know what you need,” she says. I instinctively believe her. If she were to say, Clown shoes, I would say, Yes. Great.

  She digs around in a trunk and finds a headpiece of wax and glycerin pearls, from the turn of the century. She arranges it across my brow. I look in the mirror again. Time spins backward. I turn around and face her.

  She mouths the word “perfect,” rolling her eyes in disgust. I have no right to be so lucky. She understands this, being another woman.

  I look back into the mirror. I acknowledge that the person I see, though not me, is beautiful. At the same time I feel worried. I say, “It looks so bridal.”

  She leans forward and whispers, “You’re a bride.”

  I am. This is the first time I have felt this. Ridiculously, my eyes grow wet.

  I buy both the dress and the headpiece, along with a long silk slip from the thirties, which, incredibly, is the same exact shade as the dress and also fits me perfectly. Through the entire process I can’t stop thinking of Leigh.

  Before I give Fiona my credit card, she has a few tests she needs to run.

  She says, “Sit down.”

  I sit down. It doesn’t bind anywhere.

  “Now hug me. You’re going to be hugging a lot of people that day.” I hug her. I close my eyes.

  It is Leigh.

  I don’t let go for a long time. Because I don’t know when I am going to see her again.

  June

  We boil at different degrees.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  A hot day. We went to Baker Beach and waded. Yellow tugboats chugged under the orange bridge against the blue sky.

  Michael, who is from Brooklyn, kept saying, “Oh yeah. This is a terrible city.”

  We ate salami sandwiches and drank beer.

  Afterward he turned to me and said, “You know what’s great about the ocean? It makes your fingers taste like pumpkin seeds.”

  I can’t leave him, probably ever.

  Today I had my first dress fitting.

  Fiona describes how she is going to design a long veil to attach to the headpiece. She will renovate the dress and repair the tiny holes that the years have produced; the holes which I don’t see but she sees. Then she is going to hem the vintage slip and take the leftover silk and make bouquet ribbons. There is enough for four bouquets, she announces with mild authority. I am going to have bridesmaids, after all. Lana and Beth and Yvonne. Somewhere in my mind I have known this all along.

  As I drive home from her shop, I feel as though I am watching a retrospective of my life. I see my grandmother serving me a bowl of café con leche at her house in Pasadena. I see Yvonne and me making perfume out of Comet, and my first pair of red P.F. Flyers. I see the agonized face of my mother when I came home two hours late from first grade. I see Karla McBride and Lynda Yee and Vicki Whitehall. I see my Bluebird uniform and the brown house on Eastman Street, where we moved when I was seven. I see the red plaid bag my father packed the night he left Eastman Street for good. I see my face reflected in the brass Blue Chip stamps table lamp as my mother closed the door behind him. I see David Whalen, standing under a plastic arch of fake roses at the junior-high dance, and Lana, the same night, crying because she had finally kissed Curt Armstrong and he had bad breath. I see Dusty showing me how to perfect the arch of my eyebrows, using an old toothbrush and hairspray. I see Leigh at my high-school graduation, laughing at something Jack has said, her black hair lifting in the wind. I see the crystal heart necklace she gave me that I lost the same night. I see Jackson Kent standing in line at college orientation as I plummet into love with him, my whole skin thrumming as he looks past me at someone else. I see the semiprofessional basketball player and me dancing at a nightclub in 1988; I see him reaching down to slap the ground, in time to Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.” I see my mother driving me away from his house, my clothes loaded into the backseat, the car door flying open as we speed away. I see myself skipping down Folsom Street in a long dress and engineer boots after landing my first job as a copywriter. I see the first time I saw Graham, wearing his Prince Valiant haircut and big maroon pants and orange Vans. I see the little blue Fiat I bought from Dusty, with the torn seats. I see myself climbing the cliff, alone, at Red Sand Beach in Maui on my thirty-fourth birthday. I see the thumb of Michael’s left hand as he reached across the table at the Rite Spot Bar and Grill to hold my hand for the first time.

  I
cry throughout. I have no idea where this is coming from.

  Reuben says that in many cultures, the wedding ceremony and all of its rituals are much the same as a funeral: a transition into another phase of life.

  It is like dying and being reborn, if you believe in an afterlife. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, then you’re toast.

  I was in a meeting at work regarding a new brand of women’s cross-trainer shoes when Margaret, this very petite redheaded Irish Catholic, said, “Have sex early if you want a girl.”

  We all leaned in.

  Margaret said that if day 1 is the first day of your period, then you should have sex on days 11 and 12 and that way you will have a girl.

  She explained that when the egg comes down on the fourteenth day and you ovulate, all the male sperm from day 11 that aggressively rushed in and got there first will be dead.

  “They can’t hang,” she said.

  The females are slow and steady. When the egg comes down, they are the only ones standing.

  Damn the women are smarter, is what I was thinking.

  Then she pointed her small white finger at us and said, “Do you realize you can only get pregnant for twenty-four hours a month?”

  We all feel gypped by the twenty-four-hour window. It seems to decrease our authority. I myself felt I could get pregnant at any time, without even having sex. Like an amoeba, subdividing. I could just decide.

  “Those fucking nuns lied,” says Margaret.

  In the dream Graham is back and I’ve gone to see him at his new apartment. When I go to leave, my car has been stolen, and then I find it but the seats are backward.

  I know Reuben will love the backward seats part at our session today, and he does.

  “You need to pay attention to the back draft,” he proclaims. “What has come before.”