Recently I was headed to lunch with a colleague whom I was having some vague fantasies about what it would be like if I traded my man for another man. Let’s call him Other Man. Other Man seemed to find me so engaging and complicated, and complicated, in this case, in a good way, meaning intriguing and witty and not my ability to simultaneously sneeze/burp/fart/and complain about people who sneeze, burp, and fart at the same time. Other Man thinks I am aging so well—he doesn’t know I’m wearing Spanx and that my ass is surprisingly larger out of them. When I answer his calls, I’m friendly and warm. He gets Phonabelle, not the curtness that Jeff is subjected to. Other Man thinks I am a fairly accomplished person, but unlike Jeff, he hasn’t had a front row seat to witness the really big honking opportunities I’ve blown. He didn’t see me tank on Hollywood Squares, nor did he stand in the back of the studio mouthing the words I love you as the contestants forfeited matches to avoid playing my square. He’s never seen my closets or my bank account statements, nor has he sat up with me when I tried to kick an SSRI, my one-woman live-action version of The Exorcist, Parts I, II, and the prequel combined. Other Man lives on the opposite coast, so he has no idea whatsoever who I am, which is great!
Other Man shows up for our lunch in acid-washed jeans. Acid-washed jeans? He’s never gotten into my pants and already he’s in his bad jeans. I glance down and notice he has a long black hair of surprising thickness protruding from a mole on his left arm. In that instant, it hits me that Other Man most certainly has a slew of odd habits and quirky housekeeping requirements that would begin to manifest immediately should he become My Man. I know I will find as many things that annoy me about him as I have about Jeff. It’s also at that moment that I realize I am able to maintain the level of judgmentalness that I so cherish only because I have someone in my life who knows me so well and still manages to love me. Isn’t that what love is? Knowing someone’s life story and not using it against them? OK, maybe it’s more like knowing someone’s life story, using it against them, and still loving them.
I immediately snap back to reality, focus on the menu, and say a secular humanist prayer of gratitude that I somehow had the foresight to marry Jeff.
It’s definitely “complicated.” I know that this doesn’t sound even remotely like the romantic fantasy Jeff was looking for, but everything we’ve gone through has built our history, the story of us, which is as solid a foundation as anything I’ve ever experienced in my life.*
Does this mean that we’ll stay married forever? When asked why her marriages failed, Margaret Mead famously answered, “I’ve had three marriages and none of them was a failure.” As much as I like to make fun of Jeff, I know that being married to him makes me be a better person. What started when we moved in together has continued. I’ve adopted many of Jeff’s infectious qualities. I love to have houseguests. Everyone is welcome now at Chez Us. Jeff has even gotten me to use nicknames. Somewhere along the way, Sergeant Gurwitch got accompanied by “Yes, sir,” and then I morphed into The Sir. Then because I have so little imagination about such things, I started calling Jeff Sir also.*
Our cat Stinky is seventeen years old now; Jeff says she’s retired to Florida because she spends most of her time sleeping in the warmest spot in the house, a pool of sunlight on my upstairs office desk. Jeff and I will stop whatever we’re doing, even arguing, to stand and listen to her crunch her little vittles when she comes downstairs to eat during the day. And it still moves me to think of how Jeff tried to save Esme/Fraidy Cat/Freaky’s life, even though he positively loathed her.
Once we added Ezra, Jeff deemed him to be a Sir, so here we are, The Three Sirs. Ezra is thriving in every way possible. That was another one of the unexpected pleasures of Cotillion. We were reunited with some of the families that were in that original Mommy & Me group. The moms can’t get over how well Ezra is doing—one cried when she saw him. Being a kid, Ezra doesn’t remember any of them, and just shrugs it off.
Amazingly, we’ve just been given yet another stunning diagnosis for Ezra’s kidney. During that $22,000 staycation, Ezra had one of those new high-resolution MRIs. Purely by chance, they caught a glimpse of his kidney. His nephrologist says she can see the kidney better and it may not be dysplastic after all. We’ve taken him off his daily medication, and so far the kidney seems to be working up to par. Jeff swears this is a result of his positive thinking. That’s fine. I’ll just keep making sure our son gets monitored on a regular basis.
We’re a team. Team Gurkahn. Isn’t that an awful name? Almost as bad as Gurwitch, but Jeff married me anyway. We’re like a tiny unremarkable Jewish version of Kobe and Shaq when they won championships together before their egos ruined the Laker dynasty. We’re like Brangelina but without all of the kids, money, fame, and high-profile philanthropy. We’re a modern-day Lewis and Clark and our Oregon Trail is our marriage.
OK, I’ll be honest, Jeff wrote that paragraph with me. I don’t really know that much about Lewis and Clark, except that one of them was very depressed; one had a dog; and they were guided by the fabulously resilient and resourceful Native American Sacagawea, who had a baby (that presumably had an anus) along the way. I hope they made it to Oregon, though I’m not completely certain that they did. I had the idea about famous teams and Jeff filled in the details. I was worried people would think we were conflating our importance, but Jeff argued that readers would understand we mean this metaphorically. We also fought about which names to include, but that’s just the kind of marriage we have, although I’m sure Jeff will disagree.
He Says
In high school I was voted by my graduating class not Class Clown, or even Most Likely to Need Rehab; no, I was Class Flirt. Twenty-nine years later, nearly thirteen of which I have been married (thirteen years—my indoor monogamy record), I still am a Class One Flirt. Only now my classroom is called Facebook and my classmates are my old friends and past dates, fuck buddies, and girlfriends. Here’s an example of one of my Facebook interactions with some old girlfriend/past date/fuck buddy: “Hey, great to hear from you again. You’re making jewelry now? Wow, I never knew you could make necklaces out of mice bones. That’s so cool. I’m living in Los Angeles with my wife, Annabelle, and son, Ezra. He’s going to be twelve! My wife and I are writing a book together about our marriage. It’s so crazy. Wow, time sure flies, huh? Haven’t heard from you since Chicago, summer of 1987. Those were the days: drinking beers, playing pool, smoking cigarettes by the shores of Lake Michigan at sunrise … So what have you been up to? You still like to 69 all the time?”
But how does all of this Facebooking bode for the State of Our Union? I believe it bodes well. Here’s why: when Annabelle was first sending me threatening e-mails about putting her photo on my profile page under threat of divorce, I asked her, “Is it going to be that easy?” Then I sternly told her, “It’s Facebook. It’s my Face and my Book. If you want to tell me what to do with my Face and Book, then join the site and try to friend me.” After our spat was displayed on the Facebook “wall,” and Annabelle recanted her initial disapproving assessment, I got to thinking that this was the first, and as far as I could remember, only time that Annabelle was actually jealous. Indeed, she’s never been a jealous person at all and hasn’t seemed to mind how flirty I am with all her attractive friends, several attractive waitresses at our neighborhood restaurants, the extremely fit hotties in my spinning class, including the instructor, and every supercute mom at Ezra’s school and baseball team. I have actually imagined that I could be sitting on our couch making out with a girl when Annabelle would come home, take one look at us, and sigh dejectedly, “I just had the worst audition,” and then go upstairs without batting an eye. And here she was all bent out of shape and jealous about the girls on my Facebook page, and that made me feel really, really … good. After all these years, she truly cares.
This all leads me to ask, Who the hell is this acid-washed-jeans guy whom Annabelle refers to as Other Man? Should I be worried about him and his hairy mole? Perso
nally, I could have lived very happily without knowing about acid-washed-jeans guy. I’d prefer that when it comes to that, what happens out of town stays out of town. On the other hand, I think it’s a good thing that other guys find Annabelle still sexy and desirable. It’s great for her ego and mine, too, because men hitting on your wife means you’re lucky to have such a hot one. And besides, to be candid, I had an affair once. It happened after Annabelle was fired by Woody Allen. She was in New York working on a play he wrote and was directing. It was her lifelong dream to work for him, so understandably she was completely devastated when she got canned. However, that didn’t stop her from turning lemons into lemonade by collecting hundreds of other people’s stories about being fired and turning them into a book, movie, and a theatrical stage show, and even a radio show that was produced in LA by Susan Raab Simonson, the wife of one of my closest friends, Eric Simonson. Nevertheless, Woody Allen was absolutely banned from our house—and I don’t mean to be didactic or facetious in any way—but every book, movie, and magazine article. I wasn’t even allowed to tell a joke mimicking his voice, which is something I’m pretty good at and enjoy doing when I’m drunk enough at parties. The total Woody prohibition wasn’t so terrible because this was during the time that Woody Allen movies sucked. Yet when Match Point came out and everyone jumped back on the Woody wagon, I tentatively asked Annabelle if she’d like to go and she kicked me. About a month later, when she was out of town working, I snuck out to see Match Point. Luckily, it was midafternoon and at this point in the movie’s run, no one was in the theater. Minutes before the lights dimmed, I turned to see a small group enter the theater. My eyes locked on Susie Raab Simonson. As her close friend and radio show producer, Susie knew all about how Annabelle felt about Mr. Allen and her unqualified prohibition of everything Woody from our life. She quickly spotted me and was grinning from ear to ear, immediately sensing what I was doing there. “Annabelle doesn’t know, does she?” she teased. I was so busted. I lowered my head in shame and begged, “Susie, if Annabelle ever asks where I was today, please, please just tell her I was with another woman. That she may forgive me for, but not this.” She cracked up, but I drew her closer and whispered, “Seriously, don’t tell her.” I really meant it. A tremendously sad and tragic footnote to this story: Susan died of breast cancer. And bless her dear heart, our beloved Susie never did tell Annabelle that she caught me cheating with Woody Allen.
Annabelle has also given me something so great, so awesome, so incredible, so something that no one else can, she gives me stories. As a writer, stories are invaluable, but also as a human being, I need stories. Who are we without our stories? I mean, without stories we would live in fragmented moments trying to balance all of the various obligations and responsibilities that are our jobs, schools, and relationships with the daily regimented essentials of eating, pooping, and driving. (In Los Angeles, it’s mainly driving.) Our stories are what keep us sane and humane in a world that’s often not very sane or humane. Our stories are what link us together. They are what bind us as husband to wife, parent to children, friend to friend, and all those people you used to sleep with before you got married. Isn’t that what Facebook is all about? It’s the millions of people around the world who are weaving the threads of their old stories into their current stories. At any rate, no one has ever given me stories like my Annabelle and our bewitched, bothered, and bewildered of a relationship, not even my days adrift at my military school. She was my muse even before we got married, and to this very moment she continues to by my muse. She inspires me, she intrigues me, and she is forever giving me great stories like this one:
We finally got to take our overdue honeymoon in Napa Valley a year after our wedding. We spent all day playing tennis and biking so we could spend all night eating at Napa’s amazing restaurants. I liked touring all the wineries, and as we passed by the Niebaum-Coppola Estate Winery on our bikes one afternoon, I wondered out loud why Francis Ford had Niebaum’s name in front of his. Annabelle knew the answer immediately. And I had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the information, because she knows things like this. Annabelle is a bona fide generalist or what I have come to deem a “macroist.” While a specialist knows a vast amount about one specific subject—a podiatrist knows about feet; a sommelier knows about wines (and I know all the good free porn sites)—a macroist knows a good deal about a great many fields of interest. Annabelle’s not a certified expert in any one field, but she has loads of pertinent information to impart on many domains. She may not be an executive chef, but she knows a lot about food preparation because she starred on a cooking show for almost seven years and worked very closely with the show’s chef. She has no degree in psychology, but she is very knowledgeable when it comes to Jungian analysis of dreams because she did a ton of research and reading while she hosted a show about dream interpretation. After she was fired from the Woody Allen play, Annabelle educated herself on the nation’s employment and economics policies, and by the end of that journey, she was collaborating with U.S. senators, a former Labor secretary, and UAW members around the country. So it sounded entirely reasonable when she told me that Francis Coppola was a notoriously bad businessman and that Niebaum, his lawyer, had to help him keep his vineyard financially afloat after a rocky start. As a reward, Coppola added Niebaum’s name to the winery.
Later on, when I paid a solo visit to the vineyard, I saw that in addition to the winery and gift shop there was a museum. Inside the Centennial Museum was the story of Gustave Niebaum, a Finnish immigrant who made his fortune in the Alaska fur trade and then in 1879 pursued his dream of establishing in the Napa Valley a great wine estate to rival the estates of France. In February 1995, Coppola purchased the massive stone lnglenook Chateau and its adjacent vineyards, reuniting the original Napa Valley estate founded by Gustave Niebaum, preserving his legacy for future generations. Annabelle’s perfectly plausible story about Niebaum-Coppola turned out to be absolutely 100 percent false. Embarrassed by her completely illegitimate tale, she defended herself by stating that she had mixed up the facts about Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios’ financial problems with his winery. That studio part was true, but the winery part … My macroist-muse strikes again. And another story was born!
The thing is, for me Annabelle is a veritable jukebox of greatest-hits stories. Press FU-99 and you get “The Fuck You Lady of 1999.” When Ezra was just a baby, Annabelle set herself up as the household’s one-woman Standards and Practices, and she forbade cursing. She didn’t want Ezra to learn how to speak from listening to me swear at my “fucking computer!” and the “piece-of-shit toaster!” One night after Ezra’s colic cries finally ground to a halt at around nine o’clock, we began to hear party sounds emanating from our next-door-neighbor’s house. We knew the parents were away on a vacation and had left their sixteen-and-a-half-year-old daughter alone. Clearly, she proceeded to have one of those sixteen-and-a-half-year-old-my-parents-are-out-of-town parties. I had them when I was growing up and felt that it was fine—until around one in the morning. Not only was the party still going on, it was getting louder!
By around two, we couldn’t take it anymore. Ezra would be up in a few hours, and without sleep we’d have to start yet another day at work exhausted, irritable, and completely ineffective. The party was directly below our bedroom, and Annabelle wanted to go out on our porch and yell at the teens to shut down their party immediately. I never wanted to be one of the old fogies who yell across houses at “young folks” to stop having a good time because it’s late and we’re so old we need to sleep. So I told Annabelle that I’d go across and tell the teens in a reasonable and teen-friendly manner to keep it down.
I was on my way over when I heard screeching coming from our porch: “Shut the fuck up, you fuckers!” Guess who was cursing like Tony Soprano? Couldn’t she wait one minute for me to go over there? And as in a bad teen movie, some Teen Tough Guy yelled at her to mind her business, and she totally lost it. “I am minding my fucking business and i
f you don’t get the hell out of there, I’m calling the fucking cops, fuck face!” Teens could see from our porch that she had a phone in hand and fingers on 911. “That’s right, go the fuck home before I have you all fucking arrested.” As I struggled to get back to our house, I had to dodge and weave around stoned and drunken teens who, fearing Annabelle’s wrath and their imminent arrest, scrambled out of our neighbor’s house and into their daddy-bought teenmobiles. Annabelle was screaming at them all the way: “That’s right, you better get the fuck out of here, you fuckers!” After the Fuck You Lady incident, I pretty much was given free pass to curse all I wanted to.
There’s more: press jukebox number EM-08 and you get “The Edible Mission of 2008.” As big a jerk as I am with Ezra playing sports, when it comes to doing homework, Annabelle has made Ezra cry more times than Simon Cowell has American Idol rejects. Tears were flowing when Annabelle, the czarina of schoolwork and the Stalin of everything environmentally friendly, determined that Ezra’s social studies assignment, the construction of a model of the San Juan Capistrano Mission, was the perfect opportunity to experiment in sustainable architecture. Thus she insisted that they build solely out of biodegradable materials. Feet were a-stomping in frustration when Ezra learned how impossible it is to Elmer’s-glue graham crackers together. The green version of San Juan Capistrano turned out more like a sad and crumby adobe hut assembled by an early version of a Homo sapiens still unaccustomed to manipulating his opposable thumbs than like a model of the “jewel” of the California missions. Instead of a historical replica of a religious site where swallows famously return each and every year, Annabelle’s sticky sweet creation provided an excellent dwelling for a number of home-invading insects.
And the hits keep right on coming. I hope they never, ever stop. For at the end of the day, when I sign off from Facebook after saying good-bye to all my Facebook gal-pals, there is only one I want to be with. Only one woman I want to have a glass of wine with and talk about our days. One woman I want to hold and kiss. The one woman I want to undress and sleep with is my sexy, hot, funny, smart, macroist, one-woman story machine: Annabelle. Alas, when I get to our bedroom, she’s already sound asleep. Because she just got back from New York and although it’s ten here in LA, it’s one o’clock in the morning her time and she’s completely exhausted, and she’ll be totally pissed off if I try to wake her up so we can fool around. So I just watch her sleep a little. It’s nice when she’s asleep—she looks so peaceful and it’s so quiet since she’s not talking. Man, I love her. Thank God she’s my wife.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 24