It really could have been the end for us. I would lie awake imagining Evan, Heather, Harvey, and Rudmila sitting around a plate of apple strudel, consoling Jeff over our breakup but assuring him he’d find someone who would fit in better. Kind of a suburban kitchen table version of the scene in the 1932 movie Freaks: “One of us, one of us!”
Our saving grace appeared in the form of a blue old-model Mercury Sable. One night the car turned up parked directly opposite Rudmila’s garage, making it difficult to navigate her own late-model Cadillac out of its port. The car was still there a week later. We might have commiserated with her if she hadn’t become obsessed with the idea that this junker belonged to us. “No,” we assured her, “we have a Saab, not a Sable or whatever the hell it is.” She called the Hobbit; the Hobbit called us. Every day. Several times a day. Neither one would accept the fact that we had absolutely no knowledge of the provenance of the offending vehicle. A month passed. Finally, early one Sunday morning, we received a call from the owner of the house, who identified himself only as “the owner of the house.” I am still convinced that it was Harvey. The next thing I know, Jeff is standing outside our house yelling to Rudmila, something to the effect that “it’s not our fucking car, and the next time your Slobodan Milošević high heels and yapping dogs keep us awake, I’m going to call the World Court in The Hague and have you deported!” This was a little much because she had committed no crimes against humanity that we knew of, but Jeff had sided with me. Something had shifted. Even the ants relented. (OK, that was only because it rained, so the ants’ disappearance was totally unrelated.) Jeff and I had become the “us” in “one of us.”
I suppose what happened next was inevitable. Not long after the showdown, we were on a hike in the hills behind the house; we’d gotten separated and it was getting dark. I called out to Jeff so we could return home before our local coyotes, cougars, and transient alcoholics came out. He answered my call with a plaintive mew, and without thinking, I mewed right back. Oh. My. God. The next thing I knew I was meowing around the house too. I had seen the two kitties and the kitties were us.
It’s not as if Jeff and I were combining our lives and by doing so we were bringing out the best and brightest qualities in each other. On the contrary, we were mixing up our worst and our weirdest, but all signs were indicating that our boundaries had been changed forever. Maybe we were like Georgia and Russia. Sometimes Georgia is part of Russia. Sometimes Georgia is an independent state. And sometimes they go to war and fight like hell with each other.
“If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead and get married.” —Katharine Hepburn
let’s do the numbers
Average cost of weddings in the United States: $26,327
Average cost of divorce in the United States: $27,500
Average cost of a round of marriage therapy: $3,000–$4,000
Most expensive wedding to date: Vanisha Mittal and her fiancé Amit Bhatia, 2004. The wedding was held at Vaux le Vicomte, a seventeenth-century French chateau. Twelve chartered Boeing jets flew 1,500 guests from India for five days of festivities in France. Five thousand bottles of Mouton Rothschild 1986 were consumed, and pop star Kylie Minogue entertained the throngs before a makeshift castle. Cost: $55 million.
Most expensive wedding singer: Peter Shalson and bride Pauline paid £2 million to Elton John to sing at their 2002 nuptials.
most commonly played songs at weddings
“Unforgettable” (Nat King Cole)
“Can’t Help Falling in Love” (Elvis Presley)
“It Had to Be You” (Harry Connick Jr.)
considered uncouth to play at the ceremony
“King of Pain” (Sting)
“All Apologies” (Nirvana)
“You Oughta Know” (Alanis Morissette)
singularly happy
A Pew survey finds that 79 percent of Americans say a woman can lead a complete and happy life if she chooses to remain single. The comparable figure for men was 67 percent.
male bonding
How well men fare in marriage has been linked to genetics by researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in 2008. Their study suggests that if a man has more of the “bonding gene”—a gene modulating the hormone vasopressin—in the brain, he is more likely to want to stick with his partner. Women married to men carrying the “poorer bonding” form of the gene also reported “lower scores on levels of marital quality than women married to men not carrying this variant.”
* She now fronts a hard-core band and is known in the underground music scene for her pain-and rage-filled lyrics.
* In hindsight, it occurs to me she might have surmised that because I was an actress, if I ate her food, I’d gain so much weight that my phone would stop ringing. Really, she was very clever.
4
• • • •
28 Days Later
“Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.”
—MAE WEST
One of Western culture’s early marriage boosters, Martin Luther, wrote, “There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage.” Of course, why wouldn’t he think so? Who wouldn’t want to be married to Luther’s wife, Katrina? She cooked, cleaned, home-schooled six children, massaged his feet, nursed him through Ménière’s disease, excruciating constipation, and kidney and bladder stones, among his miserable maladies. Centuries later the concept of marriage has evolved from a means to secure property, status, and sexual access into a binding legal contract that we expect to also include romantic love and mutually assured foot massages. People still believe in marriage and many vow to stay together “till death do us part.” We suspect that this is why the first month of marriage can be either the blissful honeymooning delight of two people secure in their belief that they have made the right decision or the tortuous slow-motion odyssey of a couple simultaneously reaching the same conclusion: “Oh my God, what have we done?!”
She Says
ELOPE V.: to go away suddenly without telling anyone, especially in order to get married without the knowledge or consent of parents or guardians.
WEDDING N.: a marriage ceremony usually with its accompanying festivities.
When I married the anarchist, we eloped. I wore a vintage green dress and sobbed the entire time. The minister who performed the ceremony pronounced them “tears of joy;” I think they were more likely tears of “I suspect this is a mistake.” I have long since filed that particular memory under “things you do in your twenties.”* Now here I was marrying a nice Jewish guy. I had been transformed into someone else entirely. Someone who wanted at least a semblance of normalcy. Someone who wanted to include her family in this important life decision. That could mean only one thing: I had turned into someone who was going to plan a wedding. Clearly, at our age, we didn’t need our parents’ consent, but I did see the value in publicly marking the occasion. Besides, traffic is so bad in Los Angeles that if you want to see your friends who live outside a five-mile radius, you have to provide food and entertainment, and if someone’s saying some vows, you have a much better chance of getting people to show up.
Fifty billion dollars is the amount the Iraqi government is estimated to have received in the first three years after the invasion to rebuild its nation. It is also estimated to be how much money people around the globe spend on weddings every year. By my estimation, it’s a ridiculous waste of money on both accounts. If you were to amortize the cost of Liza Minnelli’s extravagant wedding to David Gest, it works out to $29,000 for each day they were married. And that doesn’t include the cost of their divorce! I guess Liza can afford it, but three and a half million dollars buys an awful lot of mascara.
I figured that Jeff and I could come up with a celebration that expressed both our style and our sensibility and that didn’t cost a fortune but was more memorable than a fourteenth-century affair where after exchanging a co
uple of goats you were considered hitched in the eyes of the community. Jeff seemed game to go for all the wedding-related festivities.
We even embraced the shower and bachelor party tradition. Jeff didn’t have strippers at his party, but for my shower my girlfriends had arranged for not one but two male strippers, Chance and Thunder. Together they were known as Chunder. The duo had been hired to entertain our all-female gathering, but it was clear once they began their spirited disrobing that they only had eyes for each other. Perfectly buffed and impossibly smooth, they resembled plastic action figures, twin Ken dolls clad in matching red and black satin thongs, a look that not a single woman I know finds appealing, though plenty of gay men find irresistible. It was a hilariously horrifying evening, and though it was totally unnerving, I was doing everything to start this marriage on the right path, which in America means someone’s got to get a lap dance, damn it!
Jeff and I managed to plan the wedding without killing each other, something of a feat for any couple. We discovered we shared common ground in our aversion to overly formal pretensions, so we agreed that we didn’t want our guests facing the chicken-or-fish question and happily arranged a cornucopia of delicious salads and pastas. Neither of us wanted to haggle over whether cousin So-and-stein would want to sit with cousin So-and-berg, so we planned a buffet instead. Neither of us wanted to see photographs of ourselves shoveling wedding cake into each other’s mouths, so we cleverly ordered a French croquembouche. OK, we might have missed the mark on the croquembouche. Right now, pastry balls stacked into towering pyramids are decaying in landfills all over the country, because truth be told, no one really eats those things. Are you supposed to use a fork? Pick them off with your hands? They’re stickier than they look, and not at all soft, as you might have expected, incorrectly assuming they were going to be like doughnut holes with crème fillings. Even if your caterer tells you it’s a “crème puff tower,” the name actually translates into “crunch in the mouth.” Because it just doesn’t seem right to crunch on a cake, you end up just putting it on your plate and staring at it. But don’t put two on the plate, because they’ll look suspiciously like testicles. Are they a metaphor for the groom’s balls? Someone will think they’re very clever and suggest that. Don’t order the croquembouche unless you’re French, you’re getting married in France, and everyone coming to the wedding is French. If for some unfathomable reason I ever get married again, I’ll get the damn wedding cake.
Jeff and I signed a Jewish marriage contract, a ketubah, promising to cherish each other in the “way that Jewish men and women had cherished each other through the ages.” This probably doesn’t refer to King Solomon, who reportedly had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, but much of the document was written in Hebrew so we really have no idea what we agreed to.
Our wedding was truly a dazzling day and while we didn’t have sex the night we got married, one out of three couples doesn’t either. I can’t remember why. Bloated? Tired? Bloated and tired? Anyway, we planned to make up for that on our very, very relaxing honeymoon. Our first stop was a two-night stay at the San Ysidro Ranch in swanky Montecito and then we were to head to the Napa Valley. Sociological surveys consistently tell us that money can’t buy you happiness. The data suggest that once you meet your essential needs, you are not happier than when you didn’t have as much money. Maybe, but the people questioned in these surveys never stayed at San Ysidro.
If you’ve ever been to a luxury hotel in Vegas, think the opposite. Where Vegas is chrome and glass, San Ysidro is wood and stone. While Vegas plays high-stakes roulette, San Ysidro putts lazy croquet. Ginormous skyscrapers light up the Vegas strip; little adobe private bungalows dot the San Ysidro hillside.
JFK and Jackie honeymooned there, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier exchanged rings in the garden, Winston Churchill nursed a brandy at the ranch, and not much has changed since those days. Once in a while you might hear a horse neigh from the adjoining paths, or see someone strolling across the grounds, but for the most part, the ranch is very, very quiet. The kind of quiet only the superrich can afford. So quiet you can almost hear the sound of your money slipping away if you listen very closely. I don’t believe in heaven, but if I did, I imagine it would be something like the San Ysidro Ranch, if the Supreme Being has vaguely equestrian taste.
The staff at the ranch keeps up all kinds of quaint touches, including spelling out your last name in little wooden letters by the entryway to your cottage to announce that you are in residence. Always the comedy guy, Jeff quickly rearranged the letters before the attendants had a chance to change the name from the previous occupants, the Lictmans. I have to admit, after I got over the initial embarrassment, it was funny to hear the attendants address us as Mr. and Mrs. Clitman for the duration of our stay.
Our first day we hiked long wooded trails, swam in the pool, and I got spa treatments at day’s end. Afterward we retreated to the bungalow to sink into thick down comforters, fluffy pillows, and white sheets, whiter than you are ever going to get your own sheets—it was like being enveloped in clouds. We so exceeded our budget on dinner that first night that the next day we were foraging the free apples in baskets at the front desk and the mixed nuts and berries by the bar to save some money for Napa. We were lounging on an overstuffed chaise, searching for dried cranberries that had gotten wedged inside the deep folds and talking about our next destination, when my mother phoned. My grandmother had dropped dead. What? Only days before she had been dancing at our wedding. Apparently, she had an advanced form of leukemia that had gone undetected. Frances had checked into the hospital and by the next morning she was dead. And just like that, with a trunk full of unopened wedding gifts, we drove back to Los Angeles.
What do Wilmington, Delaware, and the Napa Valley have in common? Both are located on the North American continent and the primary language spoken is English, but the similarities end there. Napa was where we were scheduled to go, but Wilmington was where my grandmother lived, the place she’d be buried, and where we were now headed. Though many people know Delaware as the first state of the union, that place where their company was incorporated, or where Joe Biden is from and where he returned to every single night he served in the Senate, let’s face it, you just never hear people say, “So we spent our honeymoon in Wilmington and it was glorious!” In Napa we were going to sample wines, eat gourmand food. Our trip couldn’t have turned out more different.
My grandmother’s funeral was as unpretentious as she had been. Frances wanted to be a nurse but her family couldn’t afford to send her to college, so instead she worked as a bookkeeper, married my grandfather, raised two daughters, saw her husband through Alzheimer’s, and hadn’t stopped working until not long before she died. Frances always smelled like Johnson & Johnson Baby Magic Lotion. She was a bit of a taskmaster, but she never voiced any discontent about her circumstances. She probably hadn’t been feeling all that well at our wedding, but didn’t want to be a bother. My grandmother was gone, but on her little bedroom desk was a note she had written to me before she went to the hospital. In the thank-you note, she tells us what a wonderful time she had at the wedding. Ever the realist, she didn’t wish us a lifetime of joy; in her sober understated way she wrote that she simply wished us “many years of happiness together.”
As we shoveled dirt on my grandmother’s coffin, my mother offhandedly let it slip that she had a brain tumor sitting at the base of her skull and that she might well be following her own mother into the ground soon. It had been discovered right before the wedding and she hadn’t wanted to spoil it for us, but now she felt she should tell us because she needed to have it out right away. Napa would have to wait. Next stop, Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
On day one in Napa, we were going to taste Syrah at Jade Mountain Winery; instead, Jeff flew home to Los Angeles while I downed espressos bought from a street vendor selling café con leche outside the hospital where my mother was scheduled for surgery.* Jackson, by the way, is c
onsidered one of the best places in the country if you need your head cut open. Located as it is in a high-crime area of downtown Miami, they’ve had a ton of experience with gunshot wounds to the head. My mother was the only patient during her stay in the ICU who didn’t have a police escort and wasn’t handcuffed to the bed. Instead of our sharing the salmon tartare dinner we’d planned, Jeff’s and my only contact was when I called to let him know that my mother’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Heroes (really), was able to pluck the tumor out of her head, like “picking a daisy,” he said.
There was a television series called The Surreal Life. I never saw it, but I’m certain I can beat it. As my mom was recovering in the ICU, her head having just been sewn up, I looked up at the television that was on above her bed. On the tube, an old episode of Seinfeld was on. It was an episode in which a character played by me falls into one of Larry David’s “comas of unknown origin.” There I was sitting by my inert mother’s bedside and in a bed above her was my image in virtually the same position. Now that’s the real surreal life.
The next day in Napa we had planned to check out the sparkling wine at Domaine Chandon. Instead, I was stone cold sober while my mom had the benefit of some really strong drugs, which meant she didn’t have to deal with the hospital staff’s attitude. The nurses’ bedside manner ranged all the way from surly to downright unhelpful, so I volunteered to spend the night with my mother to make sure they didn’t forget she was there. As I lay down on my makeshift bed, a deflated physical therapy mat on the dirty floor, I comforted myself by remembering the facial I had gotten at the San Ysidro Ranch and tried to think positively. The sheets I was now wrapped in were so rough, you might say they had an exfoliating quality to them. The last thing I saw before I collapsed into an exhausted sleep was my mother’s sagging behind peeking out from the opening in her hospital gown, a sight that can only put one in mind of the march toward the grave.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 6