Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Suzanne Finnamore

  But I do leave. As I am leaving everything.

  Last night I took three Sominex just to attempt sleep. My body ached as if every muscle were clenched in anticipation of a head-on collision. What if you get married and you hate it? What if you have an affair. Would he leave you, or would you stay together? What if he has an affair. What if he doesn’t; does that mean he’s finally old? What if he turns into your father. Sitting in an armchair looking bitter and hating everyone on television. Consider how Beth and Robert broke up, he was an older man too. Exactly eight years older, just like Michael and me. What if Michael ends up living on a houseboat in Santa Barbara, just like Robert? Would I be relieved, like Beth is?

  I don’t want to be relieved. I want to care. But I’m too numb, and we haven’t had sex in three weeks. Also, my shoulders are throbbing like a giant bit them.

  What if he goes bald. What if we can’t find a house. What if I can’t have a baby.

  What if I can? Your life is over, sugar.

  What if you buy a house and get pregnant, and lose your job and have a baby. And you end up hating him. Fornicating with handymen while he’s at work to get back at him for ruining your life and taking away the expense accounts and impromptu trips to New York and London and Mondrian Hotel room service. What then.

  I worry and wonder, deep in the tomb-silent night.

  I wish to go backward, to when I was still longing for marriage and felt it would fix everything. Things were simple and unfulfilled then, like the night before you begin a vacation, a perfect canvas of time unblemished by events. It’s like when Isaac Mizrahi said whenever he goes to Paris he just wants to have a cup of coffee and fly back home.

  This morning, I told Michael I was tired. I didn’t want to go to work, go on our honeymoon, or even go to the kitchen. I didn’t want to worry about whether he’s sent his mother a birthday gift or whether the caterer will remember to return the bud vases to the florist or whether we took the recycling out for pickup because it’s Thursday. What I want to do is be alone, and cease taking care of anything. Anything.

  But I am going to get married, because it is time and because I don’t want anyone else to have him.

  Four weeks until I walk the aisle. Something dreadful happened when it went below thirty days. Less than a month is real. I want to do it, though. I do.

  I do. Jesus it really comes down to that, doesn’t it.

  I wonder now why having a rabbi seemed a good idea. He’s just going to make it more serious, with that white beard.

  I want a woman minister. A lesbian woman named Heron. Someone a vengeful God won’t take too seriously. Someone I could laugh off later and say, Oh we were just kidding. You didn’t think we were serious did you?

  It’s not just the rabbi: I have a series of regrets. Too many to go into. People I invited, people I didn’t invite, and the fact that I didn’t, say, marry Jackson Kent. Or one of the Baldwin brothers. Or Wesley Snipes.

  It just hit me that I am never going to have a black man. The black man window is closed. I am never going to have another twenty-five-year-old. I don’t necessarily want them, but I want the option of them. I want their window left open.

  What I’ve heard, actually, is that marriage kills sex. That after you get married, you never actually have sex again. First frequency goes and then oral sex goes and then it all goes. I’ve heard.

  In that case I can’t be expected to be ready. I’m a young woman, thirty-six is still young. Except for a first marriage. Thirty-six is far too old for a first marriage.

  Maybe I can get off on a technicality.

  This morning Michael is talking on the phone when he covers the receiver and says to me, “Your Blue Cross is not applicable in Europe and is not honored.”

  We are spending eight days in France for our honeymoon. He has just signed himself up for supplemental European health insurance coverage, and is wanting to sign me up too. I know this is a ridiculous waste of money. I smile and nod.

  “There’s someone else I want to put on the medical insurance policy,” he says into the phone. “My future wife,” he says, and actually giggles.

  When he hangs up, I ask him if he thinks we should also bring two miner’s helmets, just in case the sun explodes.

  “You won’t laugh when you’re lying down there with a broken leg paying ten thousand dollars,” he says.

  “Lying down where?” I ask.

  “Some hospital in France.” He says it as though there will be buckets full of shoes with feet still in them, and no anesthesia. Just men with berets and rusty saws.

  “Go ahead, laugh,” he says.

  I do. It feels good.

  Nineteen days until the wedding.

  I’m not quite ready. I know, because I want to laugh hysterically when people ask me if I’m ready.

  I’m not ready to be old, or bored, or fat. All of which I believe marriage represents. I’m not ready to be my mother; I just started looking good. Not my mother, not yet. Not ever.

  If I get married, I’ll have to have a baby right away. They’ll make me. I am not sure who they are, only that they exist. I’ll have to have a baby, which will automatically make me a mother. Beyond repair. Pot holders and kitchen magnets and big bras. Good God.

  I’m not ready never to have my own apartment again. I’m not ready to erase all possibility of a pink-and-red bathroom, which I am never going to have if I get married.

  I’m not ready to watch Michael grow old slowly. I want to remember him as he is right now, with shiny black hair and muscles and his own teeth. I’m not ready for dentures in a glass by the bed and stocking caps and brown slippers and gray alien skin.

  I don’t want to go forward, I just decided. I would like to go sideways. Revisit recent highlights.

  The day at Stinson Beach when Michael wore that blue-and-white bandanna on his head. The trip to Boston for his brother David’s wedding, the long tight black velvet dress I wore, and Michael in a tuxedo and that room at the Hilton with the tall maroon curtains. I had a good haircut, too. One of the only good haircuts I’ve ever had.

  I would like to go back there. To good haircuts and being thirty-five and tight black size-8 dresses and room service hors d’oeuvres, and other people’s weddings.

  If I am honest with myself, I wasn’t happy then either, I remember. I was secretly miserable.

  Because I wanted to get married.

  October

  In the end maybe what marriage offered was the determination of one’s burial site.

  JANE HAMILTON

  We go to dinner with Lesli and her husband, Henry, at Gordon Biersch for my thirty-seventh birthday. I examine Michael from across the table. He seems strange, but nice. The boyfriend of someone I know but not too well. I could steal him away from her, if I decided to.

  I talk to Lesli, and Michael talks to Henry.

  I sanctimoniously order the grilled ahi which arrives raw, like slices of human flesh. It’s so disgusting I can only marvel at it. I feel beyond food, although alcohol is definitely my friend.

  We drink two bottles of ZD Chardonnay. It may be that I am trying to pickle myself, preserving the old me. Find a big jug and just float.

  When we arrive home, I grab the phone and go out back to smoke.

  I call Jill and tell her I feel I’m slipping away. The death of the maiden, as Reuben would say, which makes it sound like a ridiculously youthful experience. I haven’t been a maiden for twenty years. This maiden crap just pisses me off.

  What’s perishing is me, the me who was single. The me who was me, for as long as I have known me.

  “I’m dying,” I say to Jill.

  I wait for her to tell me I’m being ridiculous.

  “I know,” she says.

  “I am ET lying in the ditch,” I murmur. “And nobody is going to save me, no kids on flying bicycles. I’m just going to die there.”

  We laugh.

  I am so very afraid.

  I maintain a conviction that I am t
he only one who has experienced this. The rest of the engaged world, I fear, is doing fine. Just fine.

  As I write this I can hear the crazy South African landlady outside telling her feather-duster dog, “Sit down. Get up. Sit down. Get up.”

  I see Reuben. I tell him that it is now twelve days until the wedding, and it isn’t at all the way I thought it would be. At all.

  I feel angry, as though he is on the Board.

  I tell Reuben how perverse it is to have changed places with Michael. How just when he stops being afraid of marriage, I start. I tell him how I realize now that it is no accident that I haven’t gotten married before. I used to think it was an accident, an error. That I hadn’t met the right person. But now I know that I didn’t get married because I didn’t want to, and I know why. Because it feels horrible.

  Reuben says, “It’s like Disneyland, where you go into a dark tunnel and the monsters jump out at you and the man with the head of an alligator, but it’s not real.”

  “Why isn’t it real?” I ask.

  “Because they’re all projections.”

  “Oh yeah,” I say. I knew that.

  “It’s the Tunnel of Horrors,” Reuben says. Grinning.

  The Tunnel of Horrors. A very real place. I feel I could reach out and touch its clammy sides and hear the laughter of the crazy gondolier.

  “I think you can escape it,” Reuben says. “I think it’s like an evil spirit.” He claws at the air with one hand as he says this.

  I wonder what Reuben does for fun, I think. He seems to be having fun now. I wonder if I am having fun. I suspect that in some sick way I am, just like on a roller coaster. Putting my arms up in the air and screaming.

  “Projections,” I say.

  “That’s right,” he says.

  I feel like I’m learning Spanish by phonograph. I keep repeating the word for “artichoke,” but I know I really can’t speak Spanish.

  Then I hand him the directions to the wedding. He’s coming.

  I was looking at Michael’s feet last night and they look just like Picasso’s feet. A small, troubling thing.

  • • •

  Ten days until the wedding. I’m off work now, until after the honeymoon.

  I call Lana. I tell her that I hope what I’m feeling is normal.

  “It’s a sentence,” she admits, talking about marriage. “More so for a woman than for a man.

  “But it’s good,” she says, with equal conviction.

  “The moments that are great are spread out more. Plus you get these reality checks; like you’re ill and he makes you soup, and brings it to you in bed. Or you hear about someone whose husband is sixty and still screws around with secretaries, and you feel so blessed.”

  “Administrative assistants,” I say. She ignores me.

  “You have to take the whole package. You can’t get Liam Neeson and George Clooney.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “You take the package. Like, Michael has that great East Coast Jewish thing going on. See, Raul doesn’t have that. I miss that. He has other things I like about him. But sometimes that quality that you like about them is the same one that shreds at you like a paper cut.”

  “Yes,” is all I can muster up. I feel a mass of paper cuts. One big slice down the center, by the world’s biggest envelope.

  Lana says, “There are times when I just look at Raul and say Stop. He hasn’t done anything, but I am just so aware of what he’s about to do.”

  “Exactly,” I say.

  “But you don’t want to ruin this time. You’ve waited for this a long time, and you and Michael are great together.”

  “We are?” I ask. I thought she was going somewhere else with this.

  “You are.”

  I ask her the final incendiary question. I ask her if Michael’s good-looking. I need her to be my eyes, now that I’ve gone insane.

  “He’s darling. And he’s sexy,” she says.

  He is. I know this intellectually.

  “I wouldn’t lie,” she adds. “You’re in such a good time, Eve. Just move forward.”

  Ah yes. Movement. But boxcars move too. Bombs fall; women release the emergency brake on minivans full of toddlers.

  Then she pivots. She says, “Besides, there are no guarantees in life.…” Her voice trails off deliciously. “What the years will bring. You don’t really know how long you’ll have together.”

  I picture myself at Michael’s funeral, in a sheer black chiffon blouse. High necked, with palazzo pants. Some neutral lipstick.

  “We could all end up single,” she says. “Look at my mother. Look at Aunt Daisie.”

  Lana’s aunt Daisie always swore she would outlive her husband, Frank, and eventually retire with her sister, Eleanor. But Daisie died at sixty-six, leaving Lana’s mother, Eleanor, alone. Who did outlive her husband, along with outliving Aunt Daisie. Silver-haired high-cheekboned Eleanor the Impeccable, who recently told me she would like to meet a man who was like Michael. This also weighs in on his side.

  “In any case,” Lana says, “I’d rather be questioning my marriage than just questioning my connections with people. Wondering whether some man is going to call me because I slept with him. Or didn’t.”

  “But you have Isabel already,” I say. “You have dividends.”

  I think she is going to say, No, that’s not the way to look at it, but she says, “Then maybe you should just have a baby right away. Get pregnant and get it over with, and not wait a year.”

  I flash on Lana sideswiping a bus as she drove her very first car, a white Mustang. We looked at each other, said “Get the hell out of here!” and tore ass. We never got caught.

  I love Lana. There is safety with Lana.

  She continues, “I have always been an advocate of making many changes at the same time and getting them all over with in one lump. A baby,” she says. “That’s another huge step. Everything’s a huge step,” she says.

  Then she says, “For me, I did it by not looking at it.”

  I realize she is not talking about having Isabel, but marrying Raul. Maybe she is talking about having Isabel, too. She really is touched. But there’s no one else I would rather be talking to, not even Camille Paglia. Who also never married.

  “I think one reason why you’re doubting is, it’s safe now,” she says.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because it’s so close.” She explains: “You can’t really call it off, it’s too late. So it’s very safe to have doubts now.…

  “In other words, we can all put on black turtlenecks and smoke cigarettes and drink espresso and lead a heavy discussion about getting married, like ‘Fuck, it’s not the way I expected it to be …’ and then mention ‘Oh by the way, I’m getting married tomorrow.…’ ”

  She’s right.

  “Do you have anything else?” I ask.

  “Well …”

  She thinks about it.

  “It’s sort of a cheap way out, but look at all the unhappy people.”

  “I know,” I say. Thinking about all the unhappy people is actually extremely helpful.

  “Tell me again how great Michael is,” I instruct.

  “He’s great,” she says.

  “I know,” I say miserably.

  Lana says, in the voice I imagine she uses on her tenth-grade students, “I know you know, but you need me to feed it back to you.”

  I woke up this morning to the sound of rain.

  We have no contingency for rain at our wedding site.

  I chuckle and can’t stop. Also, I can’t get out of bed. Because of the rain. The rain that is raining out of season, exactly eight days before my wedding. My outdoor wedding. Which I now see was complete lunacy.

  Michael says, “Don’t worry about things you can’t control.”

  I gaze at him as he calmly prepares himself for work. I would like to throw something at his head. I would like to knock his glasses off.

  I begin to softly keen. He sits down on the e
dge of the bed.

  “What else are you worried about?” he asks.

  “Divorce,” I say. There. I said it. “My father was married twice; my mother twice. That’s four marriages and two people,” I say. It seems a very strong argument.

  “Let’s get married first and then we can get divorced, OK sweetie?” he says.

  I put on my wedding shoes last night, with thick socks like Fiona said. They suddenly feel two sizes too small; they were fine in the store. They tricked me.

  I hobble around the house. Michael sees the shoes, but I don’t care. We won’t have any good luck anyway.

  I think about postponing. But shoes don’t seem enough of a reason.

  My uncle Wallace is in town, all the way from Missouri. My father’s brother, whom I haven’t seen since I was seven. He’ll be at the wedding. What I imagine is that my father will use his eyes.

  Today I had a manicure and a facial. As the women were rubbing oils into my arms, I closed my eyes and thought, It’s beginning. The ritual. Afterward I bought a cream-colored pair of size-9 shoes to bring to the wedding, in case my feet start to hurt. I have, I see, some modicum of control. I can control shoes.

  Later at the gym, I pick up a Chronicle. The weather forecast says fair and sunny on Saturday. I whoop out loud when I read it.

  When my father used to take me to the racetrack, he taught me how to watch the odds board, how not to bet until the very last minute. We’d stand and watch the odds change, together.

  I will walk alone down the aisle. Deeply flawed, it turns out he can’t be replaced.

  Michael has a dream that he is looking at a house for us, when he finds out that I own an elephant. He has to figure out how to get the elephant moved, where the elephant is going to sleep, et cetera. After he wakes up, he carefully explains to me how, once inside the prospective house, he climbed a ladder and poked his hand up through the ceiling to see how high the roof went, so that it could accommodate everyone.

  It strikes me that this is the best kind of man to marry. The kind who will take care not just of me, but my elephant.