He said that what he mostly felt was how thankful he was to have known Dusty, that he got to spend twenty-eight years with him.
“I never had to be anything with Dusty,” he said.
His voice sounds deep and low, like a tree bending against the wind. I realize this is how people age, by surviving.
Then he gets very serious.
“I want to ask you something.…”
I know what he is going to say.
“Um … do you think Dusty was in love with me?”
There is a small silence. I have known Ray since we were seven; this is the first time I’ve heard him stammer.
Ray says, “I mean I never thought of that, in all the time I knew him. He was just my best friend. He never did anything that would have made me think that.”
That’s love, is what I was thinking, the truest form.
Then Ray says, “I wish we had eighty-eight years.”
When Dusty was alive, weeks would go by when I’d barely think of him. We only spoke every couple of months. But now I see that he was an essential part of me, and there is nothing I can do about it. I just have to live without that part, and accept the void where it was. Or make up something on my own, composed of him, to stuff in the hole.
I have his sculpture, on the kitchen table. A red figure embracing a blue figure, wood pitted and distressed, faces like Easter Island faces. His wedding gift.
September
It seemed to me that the desire to get married—which, I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women—is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge, which is to be single again.
NORA EPHRON
One month and seventeen days until the wedding.
I had a long Come to Jesus speech with Michael about helping. I described in detail my impending nervous breakdown unless he dove in almost immediately. I gave him a list of eight tasks, the same ones we decided on six months ago, written on the list that’s hanging on the refrigerator. The list he has completely ignored. Then I went to the gym.
While on the treadmill I listened to the Fugees, where the MC sings, “If you let them kick you five times, they’ll kick you five times/If you let them kick you three times, they’ll kick you three times/If you let them kick you two times, they’ll kick you two times/If you let them kick you once, they kick you once/But if you break off they motherfuckin’ feet, ain’t gonna be no more kickin’ goin’ on.”
Everything costs a thousand dollars, except the things that cost more than a thousand dollars. That’s information for anyone planning a wedding.
I booked the jazz quartet for our reception. I have not heard of them, but the saxophone player used to play with Ray Charles.
Ray Charles was referenced. Twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars.
Meanwhile Jill (Calgon … Take Me Away) called me at work, on her way to Fullerton on business. She is doing a project for Rosarita.
“I’m going into my ninety-first focus group on beans,” she said.
She reminded me to send her the guest list for my wedding shower, which she is throwing for me in Mill Valley, where she lives with her dog Mishegoss. We’re going to have a high tea with real silver and petits fours and watercress sandwiches and canapés.
“Don’t try to stop me,” she says.
Michael and I went to city hall for our marriage license today. We simply filled out a small form, wrote a check for sixty-nine dollars, and signed our names.
“We could walk next door and get married right now,” Michael said. “Save a lot of money.”
It seems almost magical. Prescription eyeglasses in about an hour. I feel envious of the couples who are doing this. I imagine that they will enjoy a clean and unfettered transformation, and go on to live exceptionally smart lives.
Grace calls to talk to Michael about Phoebe, and I answer the phone.
She says, “You know I never did congratulate you.” She sounds different.
Then, brightly, “Where are you going on your honeymoon?”
Who is this really? I want to ask. But I say Paris and Thanks! and Bye for now! and I hand the phone to Michael.
As I hear them speaking, I reflect on the fact that I don’t want Grace to become a person.
She is in danger of becoming real now, of becoming someone I could know. Part of me feels pleased.
The other part says, Shit.
This morning we picked songs for the jazz quartet to play. My eyes kept tearing up at the lyrics.
“Witchcraft” is going to be our first dance.
Everything I locked away and thought I couldn’t have, it turns out I am going to have. I feel shocked.
I told that to Fiona, the Leigh-Woman, as she was altering my wedding dress last Saturday, and she got this very angry look, and said, “You deserve it.” She looked as if she was going to throw something, but then she bent down and pinned the hem on my slip.
• • •
Lana came and spent the weekend with us, along with Isabel, who is eighteen months and keeps running around the house saying “Oh no. Oh no.”
Isabel is the only baby I can abide, because I knew her before she was born. One day Lana called me up and said “Guess what?” and I said “You’re pregnant.” And started to cry.
Isabel kisses her own hand; she adores herself. She has a good name, and she’s bald, which is fetching in a girl. She does magic tricks with her hands, striking dramatic poses, arms outstretched stiffly in front of her, eyes dancing.
Sometimes when she walks, she looks like a tiny and extremely busy mayor.
Lana and I watched the original Titanic, with Barbara Stanwyck, last night. Her husband, Clifton Webb, is this total bastard, but then when the ship goes down he turns into a hero again and she kisses him hard on the lips like she can’t bear to lose him. Which she can’t. But I notice she gets in the lifeboat anyway.
There’s a scene in the beginning where the husband is shaving and Barbara Stanwyck is crying and wringing her hands and begging him not to callously disown their only son, and he says, “You’re standing in my light.”
That’s marriage, is what I thought. That’s how bad it can get.
I feel it is only natural to be afraid.
We all went to Rockaway Beach and Isabel went ballistic over a box of cookies. We’d give her one and put the box back in the knapsack, and before she even had that one chewed, she’d be screaming for the box again. When Lana left me alone with her, I immediately gave up and handed the whole box to her.
She knows already that it’s not enough just to have a cookie. You have to control the cookies.
Lana and Isabel left this morning, to go back to New Mexico. Before they did, Lana said, “Michael’s darling, by the way. He’s great.”
“I know,” I said.
With her old trick of reading my mind, she matter-of-factly says, “You won’t find better.”
I feel enormously relieved to hear her say that.
Today while I was driving, a man cut me off and I screamed “SCREW YOU ASSHOLE” and then high-revved my engine with the clutch in. I wanted to drive my car over the top of his car.
It’s two days before my period, but it’s not just the PMS. And it’s not just the wedding. Right behind that, hiding behind the chiffon veil, is the marriage, unknown and unknowable. The mine shaft of marriage. You may hit gold or you may be crushed when the ceiling collapses. Directly behind the marriage waits childbirth and spread hips and flat breasts. And then right behind childbirth waits death. Waving, in a black tuxedo.
It’s not just the PMS, although I imagine murderesses saying that too, screaming with chocolate-ringed mouths, waving bloody kitchen knives as they are hauled off to the electric chair. But between the PMS and the wedding and the marriage and the spreading and the flattening and the death, I am losing it. Whatever it is I had, or was supposed to hold on to.
I feel like someone, a very mean enemy, has poured kerosene over my head and lit it with a cherry
bomb.
I think a good system would be to take one Valium every day for four days before my period, until after the wedding.
I have enough.
I saw Reuben and told him that Ilene was pummeling me with questions about the wedding and her hotel and did I see the room and when are we picking her up at the airport and how a shuttle is too expensive and how it is too bad that everyone from the wedding party isn’t staying in the same hotel, and can she walk to David and Ruth’s hotel and how many blocks is it and are there hills and do they give you breakfast at the hotel and what kind and did we book a room for Michael’s cousin Lydia and her twin infants and how are we going to keep those babies out of direct sun during the wedding service? It takes seven minutes for a baby’s brain to sustain permanent damage, she informs me.
I fear Ilene’s voice on the answering machine, commanding us to call her. She doesn’t just want Michael, anymore. She wants me. On some level I feel that she can kill me, if I step out of line. She can kill my happiness. She can do it with questions and eyebrows and sentences that trail off.
I told Reuben that despite the fact that she is seventy-five years old and ninety-five pounds and two thousand miles away in New York, right now the thought of a confrontation with Ilene is completely terrifying.
I also told him that she seems to be warming up for something big, some display of strength and magnificence that will place her at the center of the prewedding hysteria. I sense Ilene is gaining in power and will. I don’t know what her next question or request will be; I only know that I will fall short and she will say, “That’s all right, dear. It’s not like this is Michael’s first wedding. Now that was a wedding.”
Meltdown.
In the end I was curled in a fetal position on the couch at 1 a.m., wishing I could find a way to somehow not feel. To not go through this.
I told Michael, “I can’t do this. I can’t get married. I can’t do it right.”
Crying silently and twisting my tee shirt into a ball, speaking in a voice almost like my own, not even raised or agitated. Just carefully explaining, in the alien voice.
“I’m not strong enough. I just can’t.”
As if I were describing to him my inability to do a cartwheel. And the whole time I’m saying it I’m mildly surprised, because I always thought that if I wanted to, I could do one.
He went and got me a Valium, one of the blue ones, the ten milligram. The big guns. Then he made me drink a glass of water and he sat on the edge of the couch next to me, holding my hand. I felt bathed by sheer relief at his presence. That and the Valium. Twelve left, plus the powder at the bottom of the bottle.
• • •
I had a massage today, right before my wedding shower. I was lying on the table trying to relax and feel pampered and bridal, while simultaneously obsessing about the huppah poles which the local temple won’t lend us because we’re getting married on a Saturday, and how no one from my side of the family got the direction sheet in their invitations. My naked body is slick with Tranquility Time antistress aromatherapy oil and I’m wondering whether everyone else has directions, and whether once they receive them will they forget to bring them.
Pegge was kneading my back vertebra by vertebra, and I just wanted her to finish so I could call Michael and scrape it all onto his plate. I just want to whip out my cell phone and call him and make him deal with everything, but it’s inside my locker. I thought I could hear it ringing. And the Indian flute music was being piped into the massage room, and my scalp was throbbing, and the bottoms of my feet were twitching uncontrollably. The Hopi flutes were playing and I wanted to jump off the table and scream like someone had ripped my talisman off, which they had. My talisman of being single and independent and not having to worry about whether we can get huppah poles from Ace Hardware, not having to obsess over whether my entire wedding party is going to end up at Sam’s Anchor Grill eating clams, having given up looking for the wedding.
Yesterday I told Reuben how I just wanted everyone in my family to drop off the face of the earth.
“That is how they would serve you best,” he said, completely serious.
When I get home from the spa, I spend twenty minutes railing at Michael about all this when Lana and Yvonne call to announce they are going to be two hours late and that I am also going to be two hours late because tradition demands that we all three arrive together to our twenty-year high-school reunion. Which happens to be tonight. The same day as my wedding shower.
I sit down half dressed on my bed, and say to Michael, “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
It occurred to me if I just sat there long enough, I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this. The enemy was movement.
The hot tub was full of white balloons.
For my bridal shower, Jill had hired two caterers and put out silver trays and sugar bowls and teapots, and at my seat there was a place card that said “The Bride Herself.” There was a large blue china vessel full of ice and bottles of mineral water and champagne and white wine. And right then when I sat down at one of the tables she had set up in her garden, a West Indian caterer with a degree from Yale handed me a tray and said, “Crumpet?”
I don’t deserve this, I thought, but Jill thinks I do, so I’ll play along.
Right away, two of my divorced friends got into a conversation about how they knew they were doing the wrong thing when they walked down the aisle.
“I knew,” they both said.
How? I wanted to ask. How did you know. I want desperately to cross-reference symptoms, but under the circumstances it doesn’t seem appropriate. So instead we all sat in the garden and were barraged by tiny Gruyère quiches and homemade truffles and radish cream-cheese tarts and heart-shaped chocolate petit-fours. I kept wondering how I was going to repay Jill for all of this, but she seemed unconcerned. She reclined on a redwood chaise, wearing a huge yellow hat and telling stories about her three marriages, while the West Indian named Kenneth refilled our glasses. And I thought about how I could really enjoy this, if I weren’t getting married in five weeks. I could surely enjoy this magnificent sunset if my car weren’t careening off a cliff.
Naturally I smiled and passed the butterballs. What I feel primarily about the final throes of engagement is that it doesn’t do to let people know how terrified you are. They can’t handle it, is what I suspect.
Later I attended my twenty-year high-school reunion and spent the evening avoiding the same people I avoided in high school (Alan Wappo and Fred Rooney) and coveting the attention of the same ones I coveted (Martin Neuberger and Brian Struthers).
One classmate who was newly divorced and who always wears Ralph Lauren Polo shirts sat next to me at dinner. He told me how lovely I looked, how happy he was for me that I was finally getting married. “Finally,” was the word he used. Then without missing a beat, he leaned forward with this very doubting, soulful look and asked, “What do you think about monogamy?”
And all I could think about was how Dusty had recently told me that this man’s wife had found a box of condoms in his suitcase, when he came home from a trip supposedly to see his brother in Chicago. A box. Which was shortly before she filed for divorce and relieved him of everything he owned. “Either he was cheatin’,” said Dusty, “or he is way too close to his brother.”
And although I couldn’t tell the Ralph Lauren Polo man what I thought about monogamy, which is that I believe in it, even though, as with God, I’m not 100 percent sure it exists, I definitely wanted to say something about the box of condoms in his suitcase, because it seemed that was only fair. I definitely wanted to thank him for bringing up the subject of imminent betrayal during the heartbeat before my wedding.
But instead I just shook my head slowly while he smiled his beatific, turtlelike smile and waited for my answer, a light and airy expression on his face. The face of someone urinating in the country club pool.
I go to pick up my wedding dress from Fiona the Leigh-Wom
an.
It fits well. I still wish I had lost more weight. But then part of me just says, Well, you’ll be dead soon anyway. The other part of me says, You look lovely. I mood swing between Cinderella and Rumplestiltskin.
I put back on my regular clothes, which seem like a costume now. Back in her living room, Fiona sits me down and says, “These are my rules: Aspirin. A second set of hose. You don’t know what’s going to happen to the second set of hose, so … clear nail polish. And a needle and thread.”
She hands me a small white pillbox with a needle and thread in it and a picture of Jesus on the front. She holds a tiny blue flower, sewn of cloth, in her other hand.
“Is Jesus OK?” she asks. “Some people are offended by Jesus. If so, I can cover him with this blue flower.”
“Jesus is fine,” I say.
She puts the flower back in her pocket; I finger the small white round box. Jesus smiles up at me. He never got married, is what I am thinking. All the really great ones don’t.
“OK, so tuck that in your purse.”
I do this. I feel much more prepared.
“Now. You’re going to get your shoes today. I want you to wear them at home, as much as you possibly can between now and the wedding. And then I want you to go out into the street and scuff them.
“Because otherwise, you are going to fall down.”
When she says “fall down,” I hear “fail.”
I write down the rules. I write down everything she says.
“Well, that’s it,” she declares. “Good luck.”
She is seated with her hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead at me, as though I am about to dematerialize to a secret mission on Pluto.
When we stand up, I give her a big hug. My cheek is against her long hair, which smells like pine. I pull away and walk across the front lawn, carrying my wedding dress in a white plastic zipper bag.
I don’t want to leave her little ramshackle house. It seems to me to be the center of some great concentration of wisdom.
Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 15