Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  I realize that I dropped all of that information on him without pause. Without either of us taking a bite of Pad Thai. He taps his chopsticks on the edge of his plate, an auditory punctuation mark.

  “Oh, and things are really weird right now between me and my best friend, but that’s a whole other story.”

  “Hence the verbal diarrhea,” Jared states.

  “Yes, hence the verbal diarrhea.”

  “Well, what does Adam say about all of that? About the New York Times announcement or your publisher’s request or all of your fears?”

  “I haven’t told him,” I hear myself say, and I already know the advice that Jared is about to deliver as he sucks in his breath, dropping his chopsticks on the side of his plate to make a point. I got myself into that whole marital mess the first time around by not communicating, and once again, I am messing things up by not discussing my largest, most consuming thoughts with the person who matters most. Who, in fact, is part of all these enormous thoughts.

  “Oh, sweetie, you have to tell him. You cannot keep something like that bottled up inside of you. You’re like a bottle of seltzer that someone dropped on the floor of the grocery store and then put back on the shelf. You’re prime for explosion.”

  “You’re right,” I agree. “I’m going to tell him. Right when he gets back from Chicago. We’ll have a big talk and come to these decisions together.”

  “And talk about how you want to raise your children,” Jared prods, his words a grim reminder that marriage is a series of discoveries, of negotiations and admittances.

  ADAM FLIES home first thing the next morning and takes the rest of the day to work on lesson plans out of our living room while I type up a blog post about the rabbit stew beside him on the sofa. It’s cozy. The preamble of a late summer storm threatening outside makes the living room feel cool and grey, as if we’re floating through the pre-rain in a glass bubble.

  Around four o’clock, I stand up and start rooting through the refrigerator, looking for something to prepare for dinner when I hear Adam clear his throat from the sofa. “I made reservations for us. This place in the Village.”

  “Really?” I say, closing the refrigerator door. “Where?”

  “Can it be a surprise?” Adam asks, flipping through a very ragged-looking copy of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.

  “A good surprise?” I question. “Like an I’ve-always-wanted-to-go-there surprise?”

  “Maybe. It’s sort of a this-was-Lisbeth’s-idea surprise. And . . . um . . . my parents may have pulled some strings and left their credit card on file so we could charge the meal to them. I know how you feel about taking gifts like this from my parents, but I really want to take you there tonight.”

  I raise my eyebrows at the mysterious tone to his voice and go into the bathroom to shower. There’s really no point to doing my hair if we’re going to walk to the subway in the rain, but I take the time to blow it straight, adding a touch of lip gloss and eyeliner. Adam jumps into the shower too, and I can hear him singing on the other side of the shower, show tunes that he picked up from last spring’s school musical. He pops his head out of the water and implores me to “think about your life, Pippin.”

  I almost tell him that is precisely what I’m trying to do—think about my life, not repeat my mistakes. But then I realize that people who are singing show tunes and dripping wet in the shower probably aren’t expecting me to respond to Stephen Schwartz with a deep conversation.

  The first drops of rain start splattering against the pavement as we exit our apartment. Adam splurges on a cab, touching my back to indicate that I should climb into the slightly foul-smelling back seat while he holds open the door. The driver grunts at me and continues speaking into his Bluetooth cell phone headset. Adam gives him a Village address, and he grunts again to indicate that he heard. I listen to the woman on the Taxi TV inform us that we have the right to a courteous, smoke-free ride.

  I realize when we’re a few blocks away exactly where we’re going—the Table off Washington Square Park. The driver pulls up outside of it, and I grin at the all-caps font announcing the restaurant to the right of the door. There’s a small set of stairs leading down to the sunken door that leads to a gorgeous, brick-exposed dining room and crisp, white linen-covered tables.

  I quickly survey the tables to see if there’s anyone famous dining this night. There are a few seats filled with vaguely familiar-looking people, but no Gwyneths or George Clooneys. “So this was Lisbeth’s idea?” I ask, gripping his arm to keep myself from tottering in my heels as we’re led to the table.

  “Well,” Adam tells me, unfolding his napkin and staring at the table next to ours where two women are talking over a deconstructed salad, each vegetable speared on tiny prongs. “She was reading an outdated magazine rather than packing, and it had something about the Obamas going to the Table for dinner. I remembered you saying once how much you wanted to go here. So in a way, it’s Lisbeth’s idea. She also told me to do something romantic for you. I think she doesn’t approve that I only got you hammered gold rings.”

  I touch his hand over the table, a movement that always feels forced when I execute it and natural when it’s Adam’s hand coming toward my own. “I love those rings. And this is romantic.”

  “And I thought that maybe this would be the perfect place to hold the wedding. It’s in New York, it’s gorgeous, the food is supposed to be amazing. I know as a food writer that the meal served at the wedding is going to be important to you. And this would ensure a fantastic meal. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell Anita and Edward why I wanted to take you here. And I know this place is priced so far beyond any budget we could set for the wedding. But my parents really want to help pay for everything. And I want it to be perfect for you.”

  I wonder if Adam really thinks my pallor is tied to the price tag on the space.

  “Plus you’ve seemed stressed,” Adam comments, scanning the wine menu.

  “I have?” I ask, acutely aware of how quiet the restaurant is despite the tables being closely packed together.

  “I can’t tell if it’s wedding stress or book stress. You’re making me nervous with your stress.”

  He’s giving me the perfect opening, the sort of conversation opening I always dreamed he’d give me back when we were in the throes of our divorce and seemed to be shutting off communication left and right. He stares at me inquisitively from across the table, as if whatever I’m about to say is his favorite song, spinning onto his iPod from a random playlist.

  “It’s sort of a little of both,” I admit. “Can I admit something to you without freaking you out?”

  “That isn’t a promising opening,” Adam says.

  “Well, can I?”

  “If you think it’s going to freak me out, then it probably will. Why don’t you just tell me instead of being dramatic?”

  “I’m not trying to be dramatic. Fine. Don’t you ever think about divorce?”

  “Our divorce?” Adam questions. “Divorce in general?”

  “Okay, what I mean is that do you ever worry that we’re going to mess this up again?”

  “If I thought that we were going to end up divorced again, I wouldn’t have asked you to marry me again. Is that what’s worrying you?”

  “Yes,” I admit. “That’s one thing. I mean, there are all these minefields in relationships, and you don’t always know when something you’re doing is going to lead to an explosion.”

  “We don’t really have explosions,” Adam points out. “We’re more of a cold freeze-out couple.”

  “That doesn’t make us sound very functional,” I tell him.

  “What do you want me to say, Rachel? Yes, I’m sure that we’re going to make things work this time.”

  “Well, part of that is communicating. I am trying to communicate with you. I am trying to tel
l you all about my fears since you mentioned that I seemed stressed out.”

  Adam mashes his lips together in a move I recognize as his personal calming pause, that moment he takes when he realizes he needs to listen to me. He folds his hands in front of his plate to show me that he’s being attentive to my neuroses.

  I quickly fill him in on the conversation with Amy since it seems like a safe place to start. “I don’t want your mother to take over our engagement again, even though I am sort of excited about the idea of being in the Times. And I don’t want to have Amy Appelstein have any say in our wedding plans, even though I also don’t want to do anything that could mess up my writing career. I feel like there are too many people in this marriage already, and we haven’t even walked down the aisle.”

  “So are you scared about a second divorce, or are you scared about the book stuff?” Adam questions, trying to understand.

  “Both. At the same time.”

  “Well,” Adam says patiently in a voice I’m certain he uses with his students while trying to explain a thesis statement for the sixteenth time. “Last time I checked, there were only two people in this relationship. Me and you. Everyone else can want whatever they want, but the only way a marriage can work is if you agree that there are two people who factor into the decision-making. Me and you. So tackling the announcement first, what do you want?”

  “What about your mother?”

  “What about my mother? Is she at this table right now? No, then she isn’t in this marriage. Rachel, we have to set our own boundaries and chart our own life together. We can certainly listen to what other people want, but I can’t negate our feelings in order to make my mother or Amy Appelstein happy. Anyone who really cares about us would agree to that. So what do you want to do about the announcement?”

  “What do you want to do?” I ask.

  “I asked you first.”

  “But you’re part of this marriage. We make decisions together.”

  “All right, then I don’t think we should do it.”

  “Why?”

  “That obviously wasn’t the answer you wanted to hear. So there you go, you know what you want to do. You want the announcement.”

  The women at the table next to ours try not to stare at us over their display of artfully arranged cauliflower florets. “That was a trick,” I accuse.

  “No, it wasn’t. Rachel, the announcement seems to be a source of stress, and we don’t need it. So let it go.”

  I nod, knowing full well that the announcement is the tip of the iceberg. That it’s the handkerchief the magician waves to distract you from the rabbit he’s slipping into the hat.

  “The other thing is divorce. You’re worried that we’re going to divorce.”

  The kernel of sand from the beach that was irritating my oyster brain suddenly spits out the pearl. All the words fall out of my mouth in one long string. “Even if we never divorce, I’m going to lose you one day. One of us is going to die first, and the other one knows exactly how it feels to live without the other person because we’ve already done it. And it’s awful; it is heart-stopping, life-ending awful. Adam, I am scared of marrying you. Aren’t you terrified? Am I the only one of us who is terrified?”

  I can tell from the expression on Adam’s face that his mortality wasn’t something he thought he’d be grappling with when he made this reservation at the Table. This very expensive, we’re-sort-of-wasting-it reservation at the Table. He looks thoughtfully at the ice in his water glass as if he’s trying to decide how to best handle me; as if he’s a chess master locked several moves away from a possible check mate.

  “I’m trying to understand. Is it marriage? If we just lived together for the rest of our lives and then died at the ripe old age of 90, let’s say, would it be different from being married and then dying?”

  “Yes,” I sigh, relieved that Adam has broached this idea and not me.

  “So you don’t want to get married? Is this why you haven’t written about our engagement yet on your blog?”

  So he has noticed. There is something in his voice that tells me to tread carefully even though he is still staring at me expressionless with his hands folded in front of his plate.

  “I was just taken by surprise when you proposed.”

  “So you said yes only out of surprise?”

  “No,” I say, confused. “I mean, yes. No, I love you, and I’ve been so happy these last few months. I’ve been whistling ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ because I’ve been so happy. But things are going fast. Really fast. We’ve been back together for a few months, and now we’re engaged, and you want the wedding soon. It’s just a lot, very quickly.”

  “If they’re moving quickly, it’s because I’m absolutely certain we’re making the right choice, and I don’t want to waste any time. Do you want to slow things down? Do you want to stop things?”

  “Stop things like . . . break up again?” My heart suddenly starts swooping around my body as if it’s on its own little roller coaster somewhere inside my rib cage. I love him, I love him, I love him, I say to myself, Wham’s song title suddenly becoming all too apt as I shake my head a bit to check that this isn’t a bad dream.

  “No, I mean stop the wedding plans.”

  He offers me the out I’ve been wanting for the past few weeks, but the out doesn’t feel like those moments before the proposal. Taking it wouldn’t return us to that whistling-in-the-morning feeling I had before he knelt down on the bathroom floor. It would simply place us somewhere else; somewhere I don’t really want to be either. I shrug my shoulders, unable to take the offer or walk away from it, though my heart feels at least as if the roller coaster has come to a hard stop.

  “I’ll stop the wedding plans if you can explain to me why you want to live together without being married. If you can convince me that it’s the better option, I’ll go with it.”

  He looks at me expectantly, but I shrug my shoulders again, unable to convey why living together without marriage looks appealing. Mostly because I don’t know why I grasped onto that idea any more than I know why I’m scared to get married. It feels like all the words are racing around in my head and throwing themselves into jumbled, unintelligible heaps.

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I might just be scared because marriage is about making a choice, and if we were just living together, the choice would still be unmade.”

  “Unless we knew exactly what we wanted, and living together was our choice. I mean, for some people, that is the end choice.”

  I pick at the tablecloth, feeling as if I am chiseling cracks in the foundation of this relationship by not being able to explain myself. That he’s going to think my cold feet are about him and not about marriage itself simply because I can’t put into words what I’m thinking. We’re only silent for a few seconds, just enough time for the woman at the table next to ours to swallow her mouthful of food. But it feels as if I’m trapped in a movie-worthy Chariots of Fire, slow-motion race toward an answer.

  “Why don’t you tell me why you do want to get married.”

  “It’s the difference between permanence and impermanence. This is hard to put into words,” Adam admits. “You know how there are those Buddhist monks who make sand mandalas, these incredible works of art that are created and dismantled using colored sand? And then there are artists like da Vinci who painted the Mona Lisa in the 1500s, and we’re still marveling at his work today. They’re both art, but one is fleeting by nature, and the other has accidental longevity that is possible due to its medium. I want the Mona Lisa, not the sand mandala.”

  “Our relationship is like a work of art?”

  “No, I mean, I don’t want something that could possibly be blown away by a strong wind. I want to start with materials that are permanent, staining . . . I’m not explaining this well. Okay, so the monks purposefully choo
se to create in a medium that isn’t permanent, and that works for them. They’re okay with the fact that their work is going to be dismantled at the end; that the whole thing could blow away in an instant. That’s part of the meaning behind the mandala—that things in this world don’t last forever. And I see living together as being similar to the sand mandala. Because there is no permanence built into the action, the relationship can easily come apart. It may stay together, it may not. It’s a sand mandala. And I know, Rachel, I know that things don’t last forever, that the permanence afforded through marriage is just an illusion, but it feels closer to putting paint on a canvas. You can gesso over the canvas, but you can never erase the fact that there is paint on it. Is this making sense at all?”