You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  Amazingly, my mother was back on her feet (if unsteadily) only a day later, and I flew home to my new husband. When I landed back in Los Angeles, Jeff suggested that we should try to get back to our honeymoon. But I had no time to waste on frivolous pursuits like honeymooning. Earlier in the year my gynecologist had informed me that a small growth on my uterus had gone citrus. What had been an innocuous plum for years had suddenly grown and was now a grapefruit.* Chances were that this fibroid was benign, but we wouldn’t know for sure until it was removed. I had been advised months before our wedding that there was no need to take action until I wanted to get pregnant. I phoned the doctor the day I got home and scheduled the procedure. Fuck it. I called Jeff from the doctor’s office to let him know I was going in the following week. “Jeff, there’s no time to waste. We’d better get on with our lives before another person drops dead. And if I expire on the operating table, you can use the wedding invitation list for my funeral.”

  Merriam-Webster’s dictionary reports the etymology of honeymoon as coming from “the idea that the first month of marriage is the sweetest” and notes that the custom dates back to the sixteenth century, but it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that couples other than royalty took a wedding holiday. That most Americans expect to go on some sort of spree is no doubt a function of the rise of the middle class and the adoption of some of the expectations and luxuries formerly afforded only by the upper class. It also served a useful purpose. Some couples, even my own parents, married in the 1950s, had a very old-fashioned courtship conducted mainly through long-distance correspondence. My parents had met on only four occasions before they were betrothed, so having a short interval to get to know each other or at least find out each other’s middle names before settling into a daily life made sense. But for Jeff and me, the whole notion began to look absurd. I was just too damn old. I had been busy with my career, my narcissism, and important things like “finding out who I really was” but now I knew who I was: an ordinary human female who had grown a tumor instead of a baby because she had waited too long to get pregnant and whose parents and grandparents who might have made great babysitters were now falling like flies.

  We had been married on May 12 and only twenty-eight days later I was transformed into a zombie. We may have been at the beginning of our marriage, but we were also in the middle of our lives; the only difference was that now we had a large stack of perfectly useless Waterford crystal bowls.

  He Says

  Nothing says to God, or the universe, or life “bring it on” more than getting married. “It” all began with the wedding planning, which led Annabelle and me to lots of really excellent premarital squabbles, most of which she seems to have totally forgotten. This may be because Annabelle’s brain is a little like TiVo. Her DVR memory chip has only so much space to store and save our countless arguments and disagreements before it starts deleting some in order to make room for new ones. Annabelle has never quite learned how to properly program the TiVo, and her brain works in the same fashion: what it selects to delete or save seems to be completely ad hoc. This is thoroughly exasperating given that I never know which of our arguments she’ll bring up forever and ever and which will fade away as if they never happened, like the minor opera we had about whether her friend, a rabbi, should conduct the wedding ceremony.

  OK, first of all, why a rabbi? Wouldn’t that be hypocritical for two seriously nonobservant Jews? Here’s another Annabelle factoid: she claims to be an atheist, but she’s a complete sucker for religious ceremonies—chanting, choral singing, holidays, meditation retreats, and a hundred other varieties of quasi-spiritual performances. God she can do without, but not rituals. I, on the other hand, dislike rituals as much as I do religions, but I’m perfectly open to believing in God. Between all of our vast contradictions and because we are both of Jewish origins, having a rabbi began to seem like something of a happy compromise. This was especially true when compared to the other LA, So-Cal, PC, New-Agey marriage officiating alternatives. Neither of us wanted to be married by a surfing shaman; by some one-time minor child star from a minor 1980s sitcom turned feminist fertility goddess; or by a burned-out ex-Grateful Dead groupie who, following the death of Jerry Garcia, went on a vision quest, read Joseph Campbell, and obtained his license to wed couples online.

  If having a rabbi was in, Annabelle’s friend Rabbi Mel, who, although very nice, sensitive, and intelligent, also happened to be her sometime shrink, was out, at least for me. As her therapist, Mel knew things, secret things, maybe even bad things about Annabelle and subsequently now about me too—things I didn’t want to think about his knowing while I was standing next to her in front of him under the chuppah with everyone I ever knew watching. So, I found someone who seemed like a suitable substitute rabbi whose only drawback, as Annabelle pointed out, was his insistence on playing guitar and singing during the wedding (which we strictly forbade him to do).

  Another Annabelle TiVo memory deletion is how she fought me tooth and nail about hiring strippers for my bachelor party. It’s hysterical to me that she can’t even recollect how freakin’ adamant she was against my having strippers at my bachelor party. According to her, guys who paid for strippers to come to their bachelor parties were cliché and immature, and for someone like myself who was nearly thirty-four, it was just flat-out disgusting and sad. (What’s more, she gave me an ultimatum: from then on in, I was no longer allowed to look at another girl’s pussy live and in person.) I’m willing to cop to the fact that before we started seriously dating, I’d go out to a strip club occasionally, maybe once or twice a year. It was usually during a stretch of time when I hadn’t had sex in a while and the thought of a live vagina in such proximity filled me with childlike hope and wonder. It’s not as if I was a regular customer at Jumbo’s Clown Room, Star Strip, Crazy Girls, Seventh Veil, or The Body Shop on Sunset Boulevard. Or that I ever developed enough of a rapport with a gorgeous stripper to learn her name (Taylor) or how she lived in North Hollywood with her cute younger sister and costripper (Eva) or that they both wanted to be actors someday and had selfish boyfriends who were in struggling rock bands. What can I say? I like looking at and talking to naked women even if I can’t touch them. And, yes, if need be, I would throw single dollar bills in their dance pit to entice them to give me a closer view. However, having a stripper give me my ceremonial wedding lap dance was a real deal breaker for Annabelle. Years later I can say with complete sincerity that my stripperless bachelor party is memorable for one thing and one thing only: it was not, in any way, shape, or form, memorable. My best man organized the party. My best man was my writing partner, who is a woman. Here is my advice to all men getting married: do not have a woman plan your bachelor party. Nothing against women, but women and bachelor parties are incongruous. It’s like having Rush Limbaugh coordinate the Democratic convention or Joseph Goebbels arrange your daughter’s bat mitzvah. The idea of the bash was to have all my closest friends roast me; but without the fuel of slutty strippers stripping everywhere and an anything-goes Hangover attitude, the roast came off forced and contrived. The event was so infinitely lame that several of my friends left right after the sad roast because they had wisely made other plans. Meanwhile, two nights later at her bachelorette party, Annabelle had not one but two strippers! She claims that she didn’t know about them and that none of the girls even liked them, but you should see the photos from the party. Those girls were having the time of their lives, including Annabelle. Some couples actually think it’s sweet to remarry after many years together; I’d like to skip the second wedding and instead have a second shot at a bachelor party and this time do it with at least a half dozen strippers!

  Our wedding planning hostilities came to a boil over the subject of floral arrangements. Not that she remembers, but Annabelle wanted them desperately and was ready to spend what I felt was an outrageous amount, particularly when we were going to get married outside, in Santa Barbara in the springtime, in the middle of a fuckin’
garden! We would have all the flowers, trees, and foliage we would ever need for the grand sum of free. Adding expensive floral arrangements seemed to be the very essence of overkill, like Robin Williams inviting Jim Carrey to join him onstage to do some improv comedy. After several clashes and nasty phone calls on the subject, we compromised on our little “War of the Roses,” put aside our other differences, and braced ourselves for the coming tidal wave that comprises our families.

  Besides having the wedding reflect our own particular tastes and ceremonial philosophies, the other positive aspect about planning our own wedding was that we didn’t have to listen or deal with our parents over every little detail. The wisdom of this became glaringly apparent during the rehearsal dinner. My father, Bob Kahn, offered to pay for that and hosted our families and closest friends. For almost a half century my dad has been a divorce lawyer. That’s divorce, more divorce, and nothing but divorce. He’s seen the absolutely worst, most desperate, and despicable side of humanity and he’s loved every minute of it. It’s not that he’s antimarriage, he’s just prodivorce. Divorce conveniently affirms his passionate belief that people are huge assholes on a daily, almost minute-to-minute basis. When I called to tell him that Annabelle and I had gotten engaged, after what seemed like a full minute of complete silence, my father stated with an almost Dick Cheney–esque emotional disconnect, “You know, half of marriages end in divorce.”

  Besides his intrinsic cynicism, Bob Kahn’s other most pronounced personality trait is that he’s a total ham. He loves to be the center of attention, be it in a courtroom in front of a judge or in a rehearsal dinner hall filled with friends and relatives, most of whom were from Annabelle’s side and were meeting him and me for the very first time. I held my breath as he delivered a speech whose main thrust was that I, his son, was “weird.” Although he doesn’t even know what TiVo is, I gathered by the ample evidence presented in his speech that my dad’s DVR memory machine had been carefully cataloging my behavior since infancy and it had been overwhelmingly “weird, different, and very, very strange.” What I had rather naively seen as my being sensitive, unique, and intellectually curious was, according to my dad, just “Jeff being a weirdo.” As his speech continued, my embarrassment swelled into a fervent desire to vacate my body. I really did think I might actually faint when I looked over at Annabelle’s relatives, whom I had barely met, and they seemed to think my dad’s speech was hysterical and, for all they knew, completely true. Great. Now I was going to be “weird Jeff” to yet more people. If I ever get married again, however doubtful, improbable, perhaps impossible that may be, I will be paying for the rehearsal dinner.

  The wedding day itself stumbled out of the gate when our rabbi, who had told us with absolute certainty that he had one and only one rule when it came to our wedding, “Do not under any condition be late,” was a no-show. He had warned us that nothing sends a wrong message more than when any member of the wedding party is not where he or she is supposed to be at the appointed time. So Annabelle and I made sure to arrive safely early and then quickly slid into a state of sheer panic when the time for the wedding came and went and the rabbi was MIA. Annabelle and I had to down shots of vodka to help us squelch the foreboding. Was this a sign? Perhaps even a portent of things to come? We called his cell phone, his temple, his home, but got nothing and no one. We didn’t know where he was, whether he was on his way, whether he had forgotten or gotten lost, or whether after giving it some more thought, he had decided that Annabelle and I were a terrible match and he was going to have no part of it. Plus, I started feeling very guilty. If I had consented to letting Rabbi Mel do it, we would have been married by now.

  Although we were freaking out, our guests seemed just fine. This wasn’t some hushed indoor church wedding; it was outside in the warm California sunshine, surrounded by the beauteous Santa Barbara landscape. I saw several members of Annabelle’s family happily coming up to my dad to congratulate him on his “My Son Is Weird” speech as if it were Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” Plus, many of our friends are in the entertainment business and most of them in comedy. Comedians abhor a vacuum, however brief, that they can’t fill with their jokes and sarcastic comic observations, so it was a fortuitous opportunity for them to try out their latest material on their peers, guests, and unsuspecting strangers. Our wedding was turning into an impromptu rehearsal for several future HBO and Comedy Central specials.

  An hour and a half after we were supposed to be standing under the chuppah and saying our vows, the rabbi finally pulled up in his red Miata convertible, the most unrabbinical of automobiles, without even an ironic apology after all his dire warnings about being late to your own wedding. And to top off his banana split of hypocrisy with the perfect insincere cherry, he gave the most clichéd of tardy excuses: the Los Angeles traffic was bad.

  However, from that moment forward, the rest of our wedding was simply spectacular and, to this very instant, the best day and night of my entire life.

  The next morning, as Annabelle eloquently described it, we were resting off the bacchanalian nuptial festivities at the überopulent San Ysidro Ranch resort before heading up to Napa for our honeymoon when we got the news of her grandmother’s death. From all accounts, Grandma flew back to Delaware and promptly died. Our honeymoon was over before it had even begun.

  We flew to Wilmington for the funeral, Annabelle crying the whole way while I, palms sweating profusely, drank Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle in a futile effort to quash my shockingly bad and equally annoying fear of flying. The only thing that interrupted Annabelle’s constant stream of tears, nose blowing, and low-pitched wailing was my inebriated inquiries to the increasingly irritated flight attendants: “Did you hear that? What was that noise? That doesn’t sound right, does it?”

  We made it to Delaware, alive, exhausted, and with me still slightly drunk, to join Annabelle’s family for two days of mourning, smoked fish, and other decidedly nonhoneymoonish activities. The highlight of the event, for me, came when Annabelle’s Queen of Judaism sister, Lisa, deduced from my last name, Kahn, that I was Kohanim, a so-called direct descendant of Moses’s brother Aaron and the ancient Hebrew line of temple high priests, who, according to Jewish tradition, cannot be in the presence of death.

  Armed with my last name and the laws of the Almighty, Lisa had me immediately escorted out of the graveyard by two large Orthodox guys who I presumed worked for the Jewish Burial Police. I spent the entire next hour and a half banished from my new wife in her time of need, hanging out instead with the funeral limo drivers in their time of lunch.

  The rest of our sad excursion to Wilmington was spent looking for a decent espresso and any food that wasn’t a smoked, cured, or salted fish, namely, any kind of a fresh vegetable. We found none, and flew back to LA with dry mouths, completely constipated.

  It was also during the time when I was banished from the graveyard that Annabelle was informed that her mother had a brain tumor that needed to be removed right away. Instead of retreating into a honeymoon cocoon for what was left of our time in Napa, Annabelle had to turn around and fly to Miami to help take care of her mother. The day she left town, my car was broken into. Several of the wedding gift certificates were wrenched from the glove compartment along with my driver’s license and a couple of my credit cards. When I vented about the loss of property, the smashed car window, and feelings of being violated, Annabelle accused me of being selfish, materialistic, and superficial. How could I care more about a few measly gifts and personal effects than I did about her, the recent loss of her grandmother, and now her brain-tumored mother?

  At this point, I have to admit, I didn’t know what had hit me. I spent the time Annabelle was in Miami feeling numb and lost and replaying the happy memories of the wedding in my head. I figured what had happened was that I hadn’t actually married into the Gurwitch family but Death itself. I had definitely not signed on for this, but what could I do? I was married, right? Her problems were my pro
blems and mine hers. We were married, what every self-centered, party-going, club-hopping, dating, dancing, drinking, sex-obsessed single person in the world was striving so hard to achieve. This was what all the fuss was about. No wonder everyone in the world, gay or straight, wants to get hitched. Oh what fun, what joy, what giddy and blithe excitement!

  Annabelle’s mother survived her surgery and had the good fortune of a great prognosis for a full recovery. Annabelle returned from her nursing duties both physically and emotionally depleted. Thankfully, she was also irritable and very anxious. All this death and near death had made her positively consumed with thoughts of birth and life. She was now very worried that becoming pregnant might be problematic because of that uterine fibroid tumor. I had known about this fibroid, but assumed that having a baby was something we were going to think about after all the worry-free excitement and bliss of our wedding and honeymoon had worn off, in a year or two. But after all she had been through since we’d married, a new reality dawned on her: she wasn’t some twenty-year-old bride, but a thirty-five-year-old woman whose time for frivolity and fun had been replaced by fibroids and biological clocks.

  I am well aware that many single people see marriage as the answer to or the end of their relationship troubles and the beginning of their happily-ever-after. I never considered myself one of these singles because I thought I was more like those self-involved pouty romantics listening to the Cure, searching for passionate, erotic love while shunning sunny happiness like leprosy or Disneyland. Yet I never imagined that the beginning of my marriage would make me long for any kind of break in the weather. I was beginning to understand why marriage “experts” like to say that if a couple gets through the first year of marriage they stand a good chance of making it. They all seem to agree that year one is the most difficult. (After thirteen years of marriage, I would tend to agree with them, except that they left out years two through twelve.) Perhaps this is why weddings and honeymoons are so vital. They serve as the buffer, a euphoric boot camp, if you will, between the illusion of marriage and the reality of it. But Annabelle and I weren’t going to get that lovely little respite, because over the course of the twenty-eight days since we’d said our vows, we had jumped right over “to have and to hold” and landed smack in the middle of “till death do us part.”