“Two separate down pillows,” he explains. “One big fluffy one that I sink my head into, and one smaller one that I smash into my face so I get that underground subterranean feeling.”
“Window open or shut?” I ask.
“Open. All year,” says Bill. “Colder the better.”
“I need to feel the air on my face,” says Chad. He seems almost unbearably handsome as he says this. This may be the moment in time when he peaks, like a bosc pear.
He turns to Bill and states, “But you like sleeping in a king-size bed when you’re by yourself.”
He knows this for some reason. Maybe it’s because he’s from Research.
“Oh yeah,” says Bill.
“Do you have a side?” I ask Bill.
“Absolutely. You?”
“Definitely. Always,” I say.
“Left or right?” he asks.
“Left,” I say.
“Left facing the bed or left to you?”
“My left,” I say.
“Me too,” says Bill. “That’s my side too.”
“But the alarm’s on the other side, right?” says Chad.
“That’s right,” I say. “The alarm’s usually on the other side. And I have the telephone.”
He nods knowingly.
There is something going on here, but to name it would be to change it. I can’t sleep with strange men anymore, so I soak all of this in. The information.
While I was in New York, Michael actually called the catering company, and they faxed back a menu suggestion. He presented this to me today, over a small picnic at Muir Beach.
It is right except for one thing: the sesame chicken with Asian dipping sauce. I want chicken satay skewers with peanut sauce.
“Done,” Michael says.
We will also be having endive spears with Gorgonzola vinaigrette. Polenta cups with walnut filling. Then comes the mandatory poached salmon and thinly sliced beef.
I feel a sudden glee. Somehow I saw myself with large aluminum-foil trays of lasagna, jugs of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. A checked oilcloth flapping in the wind, and maybe someone standing with a shotgun pointed at Michael. The fact that I am going to have polenta cups with walnut filling is spectacular.
I described our menu to a few close friends and colleagues today. Maybe ten or twelve.
What I find about wedding plans is that everyone wants to talk about them when I don’t. As soon as I do feel like talking about my wedding plans, their eyes glaze over and I can see them wishing they were dead.
Tonight after work, Michael came upstairs with the mail.
In it was a postcard from Graham, who is in the Southwest now.
“Did you read it?” I asked Michael. He had taken an unusually long time coming up the front steps.
“Of course,” he said. Then he added, “If there was anything in it that would have hurt you, you never would have gotten it.”
There are people who would object to this. They are people who were probably protected throughout their childhood by a loving father, and who have outgrown the need for one.
I save Graham’s postcard for later. I just gaze at the impossibly square handwriting and put it in my desk drawer. I hoard it, along with other sketches and caricatures he has drawn.
Graham is on a great adventure. But so am I.
• • •
We have just culled the guest list. It fluctuates between eighty-eight and ninety-six, our target number being ninety. Some ruthless editing took place.
It’s not people who won’t be attending our wedding. It’s people who won’t be our friends anymore. To deny this would be pointless.
I imagine long, elaborate rationalizations about why we omitted each of the people we crossed out. I see them confronting me; in my mind it is always at a supermarket, under the glare of fluorescent lights. I need a pat answer, something I can memorize.
It was just family.
We had to keep it small.
I don’t like you. It took me until this moment to fully realize that.
I feel there should also be an honorable mention list, of people we wanted to invite but couldn’t because they were inexorably connected to people we didn’t want to invite but would have had to invite if we had invited them.
We are having dinner at Powell’s Soul Kitchen, discussing whether I will take Michael’s last name and drop my own.
“I wouldn’t ask you to …,” he says, but looks pleased. That’s OK because I’m not going to, I think to myself.
We stare at each other for a while, raising our eyebrows every so often. I notice, not for the first time, that he is handsome. No one else looks like him. He would be impossible to replace.
We drive to the Theater Artaud to hear the Kronos Quartet perform. Each piece takes me to a different place in my mind. I forget that I am listening to music, which seems to me to be the best kind of music.
Afterward, we talk about whether we will have a girl or a boy, someday. It is a running debate, as if we are ordering a new car. I mention the name Raphael for a boy. I think he will laugh.
“It’s a beautiful name,” Michael says.
At home in the kitchen, we dance to Chet Baker singing “My Funny Valentine.” We dance the whole song, and then we dance past that.
Addressed invitations for four hours after work. Now I feel like a baked potato that has its insides scooped out and mashed and then stuffed back in its skin.
After I’ve driven to the post office and dropped them off, I call my mother. She takes this opportunity to express regret that her name and Don’s weren’t on the invitation. She doesn’t understand why it’s just my name and Michael’s at the top.
I tell her because it implies a transaction, the bride being passed from the parents to the husband. I tell her I’m thirty-six years old and not anybody’s child anymore, and that since I’m paying for the wedding along with Michael, it’s really our wedding. We planned it and it’s ours.
“You didn’t put my name on the invitation when you married Don,” I said. This doesn’t make sense, but it does.
I think I have her, when she murmurs, “I hope you have a daughter.”
• • •
Today Michael left for his annual Death Valley motorcycle trip. He and several other middle-aged men will be wheeling into hundred-degree heat, pretending to be Peter Fonda in 1969. Harmless, unless he spins off the road and becomes pizza.
Meanwhile at work, Clark and I presented the casting choices for the new cross-trainer TV spot. Another client meeting where they voice every possible objection and criticism and then say, “I’m comfortable.”
Then they stare at us until we get the idea just how much money five hundred thousand dollars is. Until we feel it in our bones.
Around four o’clock, Michael came back from his Death Valley Peter Fonda Impersonation Festival. He looked worn and empty. I made him his favorite dinner: unfried chicken from the Oprah book and red potato salad from the Susan Powter book.
After dinner, he kept talking about how much water he drank, over a gallon a day. He worried that he had sweated out all his essential vitamins and minerals. Later I brought him some vitamins and aspirin and turned out the light. He had fallen asleep with his reading glasses on, a copy of the New Yorker in his hands. The Jewish Man exhibit.
A trip downtown to buy Michael’s wedding band. It is white gold, with scrolled yellow-gold edging. They sized it for him in the store.
When I paid for it, Michael said, “Congratulations. You’ve just purchased your first husband. With the proper care and maintenance, he should last a good ten years.”
The saleslady laughed, after she made sure that I laughed.
I was thinking, No, most marriages break up right around the seven-year mark.
I was also thinking how great it was that his ring cost me eight hundred dollars and my ring cost him several thousand.
He admired a Raymond Weil watch while we were there. Tomorrow I will go back and buy it for hi
m.
I’ll still be way ahead.
In two days I leave for Paris, to shoot the five-hundred-thousand-dollar athletic-shoe commercial with the French director, who looks exactly like Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. He is bald and wears a black turtleneck and black pants and black shoes and black socks. I wouldn’t be amazed if he stuck a lightbulb in his mouth and it worked.
I feel ambivalent about Paris, because Michael won’t be there, and Graham won’t be there. Then I castigate myself for not being happy. It is Paris, after all.
More and more I resent all activity. I don’t want to do anything except nap and finesse the honeymoon and read Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon, who obviously don’t believe in marriage at all.
In other news, they separated those Siamese twin girls today. They were joined at the stomach.
“Just like us,” Michael said.
• • •
Flew to Paris yesterday to do the commercial. I did OK on the flight until about the seventh hour, when I became lonely and disheveled and began obsessing on what Michael was doing now that I was hurtling toward another continent. I doubted that my powers of psychic surveillance crossed the Atlantic.
I tried to call him, but the air phones didn’t work over Iceland. After I had landed, it was too late to call him.
The hotel is stunning, much nicer than we’ll be able to afford for our honeymoon. It’s too fine to enjoy alone; it goads me. I don’t want to be here right now, would like to press a button and be instantly back home. Just a nice little red button on the side of the hotel bed marked RETURN, like on my computer. When is that coming?
Nothing superior has been invented in my lifetime. It’s all chemotherapy and cellular phones.
Four hours after we arrived, the shoot was canceled. The French authorities had misunderstood the date on the location permits.
Unfortunately, they explained to our producer Micky as he suffered an apoplexy, the site was unavailable for the next two days in question, due to a large wedding that was taking place for a local fragrance giant.
They really do have a marvelous sense of humor. It’s going to cost the client about ninety thousand dollars.
I’ll stay the weekend and fly back Sunday. I am bathed with relief.
This proves two things: (1) As a professional, I am a failure, and (2) I am controlling the world with my mind.
I went to look at the Hôtel Panthéon, where we are staying for our honeymoon. The room was very sweet, with a canopy bed and a small reading chaise. They let me take photographs to show Michael, even though the room was occupied by another couple who were out sight-seeing. When I develop these pictures, I will be able to piece together their lives from the belongings and the disarray. I will know whether they are in love, whether they will last.
They are us, is what I imagine.
Wandered through the Rue du Buci, the daily open-air market. I purchased three pairs of shoes. In this country it seems possible to buy no pairs of shoes, or three pairs, but never just one or two. I also bought a bag of cherries and mini-bananas. Michael would have loved the minute white radishes, the array of roasted chickens, the soft cheeses. The huge pans of paella, and scrambled eggs with truffles.
I photographed the fruit for him. The tiny ladybug tomatoes.
I don’t want to miss him so much. I want to be able to turn it down. Instead I live with a rock in my heart. I walk through Paris, carrying it. Maybe this is what they mean by the ball and chain.
• • •
The eve of my return. I have just spent four days eating cheese. Cheese for breakfast, cheese and salad for lunch, and after dinner, I choose from a selection of cheeses.
It strikes me that my arms are as big as bolognas; swollen, outsized. I walk for hours around Paris, corpulent and alone. I drag my feet like a tired six-year-old.
My wedding dress has short sleeves.
Called Michael and wept into the phone.
He said, “Everything’s all right.”
“Do you still love me?” I asked.
“Of course.”
He hasn’t seen me, is why. He doesn’t know.
I am on the plane flying next to a French teenage girl. Her arms are like sticks. The stewardess brings me a bowl of macadamia nuts and cashews. I feel she is hostile as she pushes banana liqueurs and Godiva chocolates on me after the dinner service. Her arms are normal.
I can’t stop looking at people’s arms.
An overwhelming sense of panic and fear. I have to lose twenty pounds before the wedding. I have to get on the ground and out of this airplane. And I have to go back in time.
What I’m realizing is, I am too old to get married. I am an old maid, with fat arms.
I can’t possibly get away with this.
Michael picked me up at customs. He hugged me very tightly and then he discovered his watchband had broken, and his chronograph watch had popped off at the airport.
I believe this means his time is up.
• • •
Dreamed about my old high-school boyfriend last night. I am telling him I am getting married, and he has no reaction. He is not happy for me, but he is happy to see me. He leads me away to a bedroom, where I say, “Wait, I can’t do this.”
“Even in your dreams, you’re faithful,” says Reuben. Making a note of it.
In the past week I have dreamed of Jackson Kent, also. Jackson and I met in a poetry class, taught by Philip Levine, who looked like a bricklayer and who recently won the Pulitzer. Jackson resembled a young Brando. I thought.
I feel I’m in the wrong tunnel. I want to go forward, but I keep taking the wrong exit and going back. I am plagued by advance nostalgia for my single days.
I was watching the movie Truly Madly Deeply, where the heroine’s boyfriend comes back from the dead and at first she’s elated but then she just wants him out. She wants the bathroom back again.
Of course the first thing she does once he does dematerialize is buy a toothbrush and bring it over to this other guy’s house. And you can see where they’re going to end up married.
What Anaïs Nin says is that the dream is always running ahead. To catch up, to live for the moment in unison with it, that is the miracle.
People were supposed to return the response cards, but many of them haven’t. These are people I naturally assumed would be thrilled and would reply immediately. Now I have to call them and ask them about it, and I have to be nice and not say what I would like to say.
“Hello? I’m sorry to bother you but is it too much fucking trouble to send that little card back? I put a stamp on it. But maybe you need me to come over to your house and carry you to the mailbox.”
In light of these developments, there ought to be a way to uninvite the people who are disturbing me. I need a longshoreman named Vito to visit these people and quietly but clearly uninvite them. Maybe rough them up a little.
I want others to experience pain. I believe it would lessen mine.
I was in Nordstrom buying a strapless bra for my wedding dress, when a woman approached me and held out a black Donna Karan nightshirt. She was around seventy, with brown-dyed hair wrapped in a chiffon scarf, wearing big orange glasses and sensible shoes. She spoke with a Russian accent.
“Vood you look at this?” she asked, holding out the garment.
There is a loose thread on the hem of the nightshirt. I look back at her eyes, big as apricots behind her glasses.
“First, I vant you to look at the name on the label.” She points carefully with one finger. She is giving me the answers to a test that will be coming up later, her manner suggests.
I look. It says Donna Karan Intimates.
“A pathetic voomin. Now look at za price.” She points again.
I do. Eighty-eight dollars.
I look back at her. For the first time in weeks, I am fully present.
Then she takes this loose black thread on the hem and she pulls it. I think she is just making a point, but she keeps pulling it
until her arm is fully outstretched.
“Have you ever met her?” she asks. I realize she is talking about Donna Karan.
“No,” I say.
“A piece of trash,” she says.
For emphasis, she says it like two sentences. A piece. Of trash.
She walks away still holding the nightshirt. I see her headed for the young blond clerk with the pageboy haircut. I am mesmerized, but I look away, because I am also afraid of her. Of what she knows.
I picked up my wedding band yesterday at Shreve’s. It has tiny diamonds along the outside that go halfway around the band. I couldn’t afford the one with the diamonds that go all the way around.
While I was there, I discussed engraving with Reed, our salesman. Reed told me about an engaged couple who had FOREVER engraved along the inside of their bands. They wanted the word FOREVER repeated as many times as it would fit, all along the inside of the rings. He had it done, and delivered the rings. They called him back three days later and asked if he could take the rings back, return their money, and sand the engraving off. He said, “I guess so.”
• • •
This morning Michael said that I was a gift from God to him. He said he thought it was because he had started volunteering for Project Open Hand, shelling peas for four hours every Tuesday. I give money to the La Casa de las Madres women’s shelter and to San Francisco Suicide Prevention, but not that much.
I don’t know how I got Michael. Maybe I just had a store credit from some other very lonely and shitty life.
August
You go not, till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET
I called Dusty. I hadn’t heard from him in a few months, nor had he responded to my wedding invitation, not even to ridicule it.
I dial his number: 555-7029. He answers on the tenth ring.
“Hey.”
Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 13