by Joel Derfner
Seven months after Seddon was executed (his last act was to summon his solicitor to the jail to find out how much his furniture had fetched at auction; when he learned it wasn’t much he fell into a rage), a newspaper printed Margaret Seddon’s statement that her husband had held her at gunpoint and forced her to do his dastardly bidding, but this statement was revealed in short order to be false, made for money and because Margaret was sick of her neighbors calling her a murderess. So she up and went with her five children to California, where one of those children married and produced offspring that married and produced offspring that married and produced me.
These, then, were the models of marriage my family put before me:
Two people who had an affair with each other, betraying the spouses to whom they’d promised to be faithful, and then went on to spend their lives working for the rights of the disenfranchised.
One woman who, after nine attempts, still couldn’t seem to get it right, no matter how hard she tried.
A tyrant and adulterer and/or serial rapist who cowed his wife into such submission she helped him commit murder.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to take from these examples. That you can have a successful marriage but only if you break one of the Ten Commandments? That the level of marital dysfunction in my family had been declining for a hundred years, so even if Mike and I had problems here and there I’d still probably make it through without being executed?
That marriage is a very, very complicated thing?
I finally received definitive word from my dad. No wedding rings anywhere. Not his, not my grandfather’s, not my great-great grandfather’s.
So I decided to leave Mike ringless for the moment and ignore the problem and hope it would go away, an approach that had always served me well in the past.
3
Deciding on Living Arrangements
We envision our ceremony,” I read, “as being—”
“Tedious,” Mike offered.
I glowered at him. “We envision our ceremony as being—”
“Full of bitterness.”
“Sweetheart, this is the third question on the first page of the book. If you won’t even let me finish asking it, how are we ever going to plan a wedding?”
It was early June of 2008; I was still in the doghouse with the Los Angeles branch of my family, but I had enough faith in my ability to regain my credit that I’d started buying wedding planning books (on this occasion I was reading from Karen Bussen’s Simple Stunning Wedding Organizer). Mike rolled his eyes and sighed but pursed his lips, so I continued. “We envision our ceremony as being: short and simple, reverent and religious, non-religious but spiritual, secular and straightforward, formal and traditional, or unique and personalized?”
“Which one will annoy you the most?”
“One that involves you.”
“I think it should be unique and personalized, and we should just speak our vows from the heart, rather than writing them ahead of time. And we can give each other rings we make out of wood we find in the park, since we’ll be getting married in the cathedral of nature.”
“Why are you so mean to me?”
“Because it’s fun.”
“I’m checking ‘short and simple.’” I did so. “Next question. Our favorite time of year for our wedding would be (rank from one to five): spring, summer, fall, winter, doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t know,” said Mike. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I asked first.”
“No, actually, given that I’m reading the questions, I asked first.”
“I don’t know. Fall?”
“Sounds good to me.” I opened my mouth to start reading but stopped short. “Wait a minute. This fall? As in like three to six months from now?”
Mike cocked his head. “I don’t see why not.”
I looked at the book under my hand. “Then I think we have to go through the questions a little faster.”
But the next Thursday afternoon, when I got out of the summer-school class I was teaching—a class during which a homosexual college student thinner than I will ever be had referred to the heart-rending “Non, je ne pourrais jamais vivre sans toi” (“If It Takes Forever I Will Wait for You”) as sung by Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as “the blonde girl’s ‘I’m sad’ song,” so my nerves were already frayed—I checked my messages to find one from Mike asking me to call him. His voice was unsteady; not all the way to the-house-is-on-fire unsteady or listen-honey-we-have-to-go-into-witness-protection-so-get-readyfor-a-new-life-as-a-Mennonite unsteady, but still worrisome. When I got him on the phone, Mike said, “My dad has cancer.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“He went to the doctor last week because his asthma was getting worse, and it turned out it wasn’t his asthma. It was a stage-four tumor.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry.” Silence on the other end of the line. “Listen, I’m going to jump in a cab right away. Is there anything I can bring you?”
“No. Just come home.”
I had always loved being around Mike’s parents. Mr. Combs was huge and his wife tiny, like the discarded first draft of a nursery rhyme; he wore glasses and was mostly bald, with a few wisps of hair floating perpetually above his head, while Mrs. Combs was thin and perky and usually dressed in something yellow. (Whenever I refer to them by their last names, people ask me why I hate them. I don’t hate them. I love them. It just feels really weird and disrespectful to call them by their first names, and I obviously can’t call them “Mom” and “Dad.” Maybe it’s a Southern thing.) Theirs was the first family I’d had a close connection to in which nobody had divorced anybody or died of a terminal illness or been hanged by the neck until dead for murdering his tenant. The nuclear unit was whole, and I found this incredibly comforting.
What made it even more comforting was how ordinary they seemed (as opposed to my family, which going back even just a few generations is made up, in addition to the real estate moguls, the civil rights activists, and the poisoners, of rednecks, Communist agitators, slave owners, horse thieves, and a pretender to the throne of Russia). Mike and I would visit them and we would sit around and they would say prosaic things about their neighbors or the beach or the choir they had recently joined and then we would leave, and I thought it was heaven.
“I read this great article the other day,” Mr. Combs would say, “about ways to keep deer from eating your hosta plants.”
“It’s awful,” Mrs. Combs would say. “We used to have beautiful hostas. Then the deer ate them.”
“Apparently it’s really hard to keep deer from eating your hostas,” Mr. Combs would say. “You can put up strips of plastic bags. But then we’d have strips of plastic bags all over our front lawn. You can put a stick in the ground and put some soap on it, and sometimes that’ll work, but not always. We’re going to try it and see.”
“That’s great,” I would say, thrilled at the normality of it all. “Good luck.”
Then there were the occasional moments of surprise indicating that not all was as it seemed, which moments tended to happen on Christmas Day. Take for example Christmas of 2005, when we went to the firing range. Mr. Combs, as a member of the NRA, owned several guns, one of which I used to shoot at a poster of Osama bin Laden provided by the firing range for that very purpose. (For the record, I hit him in the face. Five times. The government should have just airlifted me into Afghanistan and Zero Dark Thirty would have been twenty minutes long.)
Or, going back earlier, the day I first met them, Christmas of 2003, when we (Mike, his sister, Cathy, my dog, Sasha, and I) drove a couple of hours to their small ranch house on the Jersey shore, where they had moved a few years earlier from Iowa. The whole thing was as traditional a Christmas as one could ask for: we talked about the weather, we ate hors d’oeuvres, we looked at embarrassing childhood pictures of Mike and
Cathy, we ate Christmas dinner, we opened presents, we ate pie, we talked about real estate, we ate chocolates, we pulled out their homemade Ouija board and contacted their spirit guide, 28.
Mike had alerted me to the possibility that this might happen. Apparently it’s 28’s job to greet the recently deceased upon their arrival in the afterlife, but he’s also very interested in the spiritual progress of those of us who have yet to shuffle off this mortal coil; at this point he’d been sharing his insights with Mr. and Mrs. Combs (and, through them, with Mike and Cathy) for almost three decades. 28’s communications while I was there concerned themselves partially with the Combses’ failure to talk to him in a while—it had been five weeks or so—but mostly with Cathy’s path in life. He gave her what seemed to me to be a lot of good but self-evident advice, like “Cathy must consider the choices she makes in the upcoming months carefully.” (“He’s not so good with practical things,” Mike had told me. “You’ll ask him, ‘Where are my keys?’ and he’ll say, ‘They are where they need to be,’ or, ‘They will appear when you are ready for them.’” I thought this sounded obnoxious, but since there are already precious few supernatural beings in whose names countless civilizations have not been massacred, I felt it unnecessary to alienate this one.)
At one point, Mr. Combs asked me whether I had questions. Of course there were any number of things I was dying to know (Is whatever this thing is with Mike going to work? Or should I really not be dating him at all, but holding out for someone with straighter teeth? And in the meantime can you tell me which gym Chris Meloni works out at so I can go there and wait until he’s there and then arrange a completely accidental meeting in the shower?), but somehow I couldn’t quite see my way through to asking about them, so I said, “No, nothing in particular—though if 28 has anything to say to me, I’d be happy to listen.” I hoped by this maneuver both to get some good if self-evident advice and to ingratiate myself with my hosts while also avoiding the awkwardness of addressing a cardinal number.
Unfortunately, 28 saw right through my ploy; he bade me welcome and told me to read the transcripts Mike’s parents had made of his other communications with them so I could get to know him better. This didn’t strike me as such an onerous assignment until Mike told me that these transcripts ran to some five hundred typed pages. Then 28 went back to castigating Mr. and Mrs. Combs for neglecting him, and eventually those of us who lived in New York piled into the car and went back there.
Of course I knew that the family had had its contretemps; Mike’s father had been a drunk for years before sobering up, for example, which meant that Mike hadn’t grown up in a particularly normal atmosphere, but Mr. Combs was now a teetotaler so I just reveled in the blandness. I spun daydream after daydream in which Mike and his family and I sat around for the rest of our lives actually talking about the weather. It was sheer bliss.
Until the esophageal cancer.
Which of course made wedding planning difficult.
I am no stranger to terminal illness. My mother’s juvenile diabetes didn’t kill her until I was nineteen, but I don’t remember a day when I didn’t know she was living on borrowed time; as the years passed, furthermore, the interest rate kept rising, and it became more and more difficult to act as if the grim and usurious reaper weren’t hanging out on the porch, waiting for the right moment to slip in. I can still summon with perfect ease the image of my mother’s legs, swollen, useless, flowery with scabs and bleeding ulcers, still hear her groaning in pain while I wrote my high-school senior-year report on Nikolai Bukharin and the Stalinist purge trials of 1938 because she’d been like this all evening and I’d already gone to her room a couple times and asked whether I could do anything to help her (my dad was off desegregating the University of Alabama) and been given a haunted “no” or just a shake of the head, and if I couldn’t stop her agony then I might as well just write the goddamn report.
So when Mike, concerned about his mother’s ability to care for a husband so much larger than she was, asked, “Can my parents move in with us when my dad gets too sick to take care of himself ?” what I said was not “Are you insane?” but “Sure,” because to be able to help his family deal with a slow death by illness and to refuse to do so seemed unconscionable. “As long,” I added, “as I come first.”
It ought possibly to have occurred to me that, having dealt with a dying parent once already, I didn’t really need to repeat the experience.
Mike and I live in a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn the top floor of which we rent out to others; at the time, those others were Cathy and her husband Dennis. The two remaining floors are divided as follows: on the second floor are Mike’s office, the TV room, the living room, a bathroom, and our bedroom; on the first, the dining room, my office, a bathroom, and the kitchen. The plan we made in anticipation of the Combses’ arrival, sensible if discommodious, was that we would move everything in my office upstairs to the living room with the exception of the piano, which, since it couldn’t go around the corners necessary to get it up the stairs, we would put in the kitchen. My in-laws-elect would take the dining room and my office as their apartment, putting me effectively in the middle of a Combs sandwich, and we would share the kitchen with them. Though this plan opened the door to all sorts of unnerving possibilities—I didn’t know exactly what would happen to the piano if I accidentally flung spaghetti Bolognese into it, for example, but I felt confident that its sound quality would not improve—it seemed at least to allow Mr. and Mrs. Combs a sufficient measure of privacy and independence while at the same time not completely uprooting our lives.
And I’m sure it would have done exactly that, if we had stuck to it.
When I came home on the day the Combses moved in, however, I went to the kitchen to make some lemonade (I make delicious lemonade) and found the door shut.
“I thought we were going to leave the kitchen door open and close my office door,” I said to Mike in Couplespeak.
(Permit me, please, a brief digression on the subject of Couplespeak, that dialect of English in which the second person singular pronoun is replaced with the first person plural. “We should be more careful about locking the front door,” Mike might say, meaning, obviously, “You should be more careful about locking the front door.” “We ought to clean up the kitchen more thoroughly when we cook” means “You ought to clean up the kitchen more thoroughly when you cook,” and so on. Basic Couplespeak is pretty straightforward. It’s when you add reciprocal pronouns that things start getting interesting. “We need to make more of an effort to hear each other’s perspectives” actually means “You need to make more of an effort to hear my perspective”; notice that the singular [“perspective”] is also replaced with the plural [“perspectives”].
(Constructions more complex than these should be attempted only by the advanced student, because something like “Remember when we said we thought it was important to shut the gate before we go to bed?” actually means, “I resent you deeply for not shutting the gate before we go to bed even though I’ve asked you countless times, and your consistent failure to do so makes me feel like you don’t think anything I say is important, so, while I was considering trying to find something we could watch together tonight, now I’m just going to turn the channel to HGTV and if you want to watch two hours of House Hunters International with me on TiVo you can, but if you don’t then I don’t give a damn.”)
“I thought we were going to leave the kitchen door open and close my office door,” I said to Mike in Couplespeak.
“There’s no fan in your office,” he said, “and my dad’s really hot, so we needed the air from the kitchen to cool him off.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “So we’ll get some fans tomorrow and we can open up the kitchen again, right?”
“Absolutely,” said Mike soothingly.
“Sure,” he said when I asked again a few days later, and I felt a sinking sense of doom.
“Look,” he said when I asked once more, a week after th
at, “my dad’s got enough going on as it is. Can you make do without the piano for a few more weeks? Because that’s how much time he has.”
I took a breath and said, “Fine.” Certainly if I were dying of cancer I imagined there would be things I’d rather do with my time than rearrange furniture. Besides, I didn’t have any imminent deadlines, and if worse came to worse I could use the pianos in the department where I taught at NYU. As for the kitchen—well, we just ordered a lot of pizza.
If I had it to do over again, I would have left the house the instant I saw that closed door, bought twenty industrial-strength fans, come back, plugged them in, and posted armed guards to guarantee me access to the kitchen. Because, though I didn’t understand it until it was far too late, by giving up the kitchen, we were giving up our hearth.
It had been our habit, Mike’s and mine, to take some time every day when he came home from work to sit together in the kitchen and discuss whatever was on our minds. These minutes of connection grounded us and allowed us to direct our attention to each other, if only for a few minutes, so that we could keep our relationship on track and notice anything that needed to be addressed and share an intimate moment and remind ourselves and each other how important it is to make yourself vulnerable to another person so that he can respect that vulnerability and show you that you’re safe.