by Jessi Klein
But that wasn’t Mike and me. Two months in, before he even told me he loved me, we were enjoying a long Labor Day weekend—picnicking on the rug in his apartment, drinking whiskey, and talking about where we were on 9/11 (the deepest conversation you can have with another person). I told him I knew we’d been spending so much time together because he’d had the week off from work, and he shouldn’t feel any pressure to continue this schedule because I was aware we’d been in a bit of a bubble.
He looked out the window, and then at me, and said, “But the thing is, I’m in.”
I’m in.
Every girlfriend I told that story to—and I told all of them—had the same reaction. Their eyes would well up and they’d softly whisper, “Oh my God.”
So that’s how it was.
From “I’m in” onward, Mike was never scared of commitment. After six months, he started asking if I wanted to move in with him. Part of me did,2 but part of me also knew what a shitshow it would be to move out again if things fell apart,3 and part of me also kept thinking about the lyrics to “Single Ladies,” and I thought if Beyoncé was saying he should put a ring on it I should probably listen, because just fucking look at her.
But I wasn’t stressed about getting engaged. My worst nightmare—worse even than my childhood nightmare about being abducted by Alf—was one day having to cajole or bully a guy into marrying me by giving him an ultimatum. In my head, that was a move reserved for a certain type of woman who was not me, and I’m not exactly sure how to describe her, but in a movie she would be played by Jeanne Tripplehorn carrying a big expensive purse and yelling into a very large cell phone.
In late 2011, we started talking in earnest about the idea that we would get married. I didn’t care how he proposed, and I didn’t especially care when he did it, just that he wanted to do it. Which I knew he did. Because he’d told me. Did I mention we had gone to couples therapy to work out some issues? Whatever, doesn’t matter. He wanted to do it. Right? We’d have these little shorthand conversations—
“So, just checking, just so I know, because I’m not Jeanne Tripplehorn on a large cell phone, when?”
Mike said February of next year, after we’ve worked on our issues a little while longer.
Cool! My life is all set! It’s so nice when your life is going perfectly.
Not only did I feel sure this engagement would happen, so did everyone else. Starting about a year into our relationship, every time I told anyone we were going on any kind of vacation they would get a look in their eyes and whisper, “You’re getting engaged, right?” This speculation hit a fever pitch right before our trip to Paris for his fortieth birthday. I’m not sure if Parisians are aware of this, but in the minds of many Americans, their museums, rich history, and incredible food are all a backdrop for American men to fork over little blue boxes to the American women who have ensnared them.
But we did not get engaged in Paris. Nor did we get engaged in Turks and Caicos, nor on our trip to various quaint spas in the Northeast.
Then “February of next year” arrives. Mike has been promoted, and this is the first year he is in charge of a very important yearly work event. He is stressed out. I know he’s stressed out, but he needs me to know it’s really bad, worse than I can imagine. I tell him I know it’s bad and I am supportive! He says he can’t deal with getting engaged until after the event, which is in the middle of March. I am an angel-saint, so I say this is fine, I don’t care. I click, for maybe a millimeter of a second, on some engagement rings online before shamefully slamming my laptop closed, albeit with a little grin on my face. It’s amazing how calm I am about my own life!
So we start planning a vacation for after his work event, a vacation he’ll especially need after working so hard. But it’s also perfect, because it’s when we’re going to get engaged. He asks where I want to go, and I say I’ve always dreamed of going to Napa, something I’ve never done before. He’s never been to Big Sur, so we split the difference and talk about flying to San Francisco, driving to Napa for a few days, then continuing on to Big Sur. Mike, who has a decidedly luxe notion of vacationing, gets very excited about the idea of going to Post Ranch Inn, a hotel set on the cliffs of Northern California that has won every Most Luxurious, Most Ridiculous, Most Over the Top award from Travel & Condé Whatever magazine so many times in a row that now they’re just showboating. The beauty and drama of it is so incredible that even visiting their website feels like a trip you cannot afford. The Spa at Post Ranch offers all kinds of California woo-woo services, including sessions of spiritual guidance billed as a “Drum Journey.” I almost take the drum journey, but book a Reiki session instead, fearful that the drum journey could end in me leaving Big Sur with a bindi and a bong, the way some white chicks return from the Bahamas with cornrows.
So we book our spa appointments and make restaurant reservations in Napa and reserve a car. Our tickets home give us a layover in LA, where Mike has to be for a few days for work immediately after our vacation ends. I don’t really have to be there but I figure I should go with him since we’ll have just gotten engaged. I’ll find stuff to do in between our Pinot-filled dinners with friends toasting us and asking have we thought about where we’re doing it and we’ll look at each other and smile because we know we’re just going to enjoy being engaged for a while.
Then, the weekend before we leave for our trip, we get in a fight, and it spills over into the following week. It’s nothing huge, but there’s daily bickering, a low gaslight of negativity that is never totally extinguished. It’s not the dream, to be at each other this way just before such an important moment in our shared lives, but here we are arguing in his car the morning before we’re supposed to leave. As he’s dropping me off at my apartment on his way in to work, I make him pull over for a moment so we can keep bitching at each other. After I lob another snipe into the air, Mike frowns and says, “Have you been so mad at me this week because you know I’m not proposing to you on this trip?”
!
… …
Um, no.
I don’t remember what exactly I had been mad about before that information came to light, because once that cat was out of the bag everything became kind of dark, as if someone had just dilated my pupils so that only one point was harshly clear while everything else was a smudge. I had to get out of the car, but the awkward part, the part that made this my life, was that my cleaning lady was working in my apartment, so I couldn’t go home. I got out of the Toyota Matrix, while Mike yelled after me, and made my way to the one place that always felt safe: Spa Belles.4
Trying not to weep, I went inside to get a manicure and took a seat next to a girl who was waiting for a friend. A few minutes later, her friend walked in and immediately raised her left hand, followed by the I-just-got-engaged scream. At which point her friend said, and these are her exact words: “Ohmigod! I knew something was up when he asked you to go to the top of the Empire State Building!”
Good grief.
I spent the day in a fog. I kept trying to make sense of how this could have happened, this misunderstanding. Was it a misunderstanding or a miscommunication? Or worse: Was this my wake-up call that I am one of those people who has no self-awareness? The type of human mosquito who clips her nails on an airplane or scream-talks into her cell phone at a café? I kept turning the situation over and over, trying to formulate an angle on the scenario that both made sense and wasn’t decimating.
That evening, we started to pack. Our suitcases were open and we were silently folding clothes when I asked him, “So, are you not proposing on the trip because you wanted to propose in a different way, or because you’re not sure you want to marry me?”
He was silent.
We spent the next three hours rotating between fighting, crying, drinking, talking, reasoning, and threatening. At one point I panicked and said I had to get out of the house. I stood up to grab my stuff, whereupon Mike panicked and grabbed my arm and started weeping. It was like a soap opera
with a less talented, less attractive cast.
Whiskey came out. Some clothes made it into the bags, and then other clothes didn’t go into bags, as he explained, over and over again, that he felt like we still had things to work out, that he didn’t feel ready, that he just wasn’t 100 percent sure, that maybe it could be a few more months, soon, just not now. I stared at little details of his bedroom, the ugly brown wool throw pillow with once white but now grayish embroidery, the even uglier white-noise machine perched quietly on top of the side table like a Band-Aid-colored beetle. I zeroed in on the checks of his shirt, looking at the blue check, then the white check. I was surprised at how many banal little objects were woven into this moment, and imagined they were all alive, and that all of them were as surprised as I was that the relationship was ending and that soon we’d all have to say good-bye forever.
I told him I didn’t see the point of going on this insanely romantic trip anymore. I didn’t want to go for a coastline horseback ride with some guy who didn’t feel like he knew enough about me to marry me. You already know me, I insisted. I like dogs and comedy. I’m insecure but loving. That’s who I am.
To make our seven a.m. flight, we were supposed to wake up at four thirty in the morning. From nine p.m. until three thirty in the morning, we debated over whether or not we should cancel the trip. At three forty-five a.m. we decided we would go, and fell asleep.
I woke up when the alarm went off, had one of those terrible moments of not remembering why I should be sad, and then groaned. We rode in total quiet to the airport, the little knot of anger behind my sternum getting tighter and tighter. As we were about to check ourselves in at the JetBlue kiosk, I hissed something jealous and miserable into his ear. Mike, furious, said we should turn around and leave. A little girl with a monkey backpack stared at us as we made a scene.
“What will I tell my parents?” I whimpered.
He pulled me over next to a bag drop, and we debated once again whether we would go on the trip. As we argued, the agent picked up my bag and put it on the conveyor belt.
We were going.
So we made it to San Francisco, where we’d planned to spend one night until leaving for Napa in the morning. On the plane, I’d promised Mike I would call a truce and suppress the negative feelings, but I was lying. At four in the afternoon, I walked into the hallway of our hotel and called my friend Kate, bawling. I couldn’t do this. She offered to book me a flight home the next morning. I was a woman sobbing in a hotel corridor, which is kind of incredible, because when I was little I thought I was going to be a senator.
My spiral continued through what was supposed to have been our romantic dinner. I started sulking around appetizers, and a few glasses of (admittedly incredible) Sancerre later, I was yelling again. My tirade continued in the cab, in the elevator, up to our room, and even for a minute or two after Mike stormed out of our hotel room, because I wanted to make sure he heard me through the door.
I don’t remember falling asleep. I woke up at dawn, and Mike was next to me. He had returned to the room. I looked at the back of his neck, and felt three things, each crushing in its own way.
Exhaustion.
Love.
And uncertainty.
I knew I had two choices. Choice number one was that I could take Kate up on her offer and go home.
Choice number two was that I could continue on the trip with him, and most likely we’d be having that sad species of vacation couples go on when it’s the last one they’ll take together, and sometimes one person knows it and sometimes both people know it.
But I knew that if I left, our relationship would definitely be over, right now.
I touched his arm and said, “Let’s go.”
We wearily walked to pick up our rental car, and that is where a minor miracle occurred. They were sold out of the model we’d reserved, and so, at no extra cost, they upgraded us to a brand-new Volvo convertible with a leather interior the color of cream. When Mike turned on the engine, he gasped.
“Oh my God,” he said. “The seats are heated.”
The yuppie asshole in each of us was so in awe of the car that we both immediately cheered up and headed to wine country. (I did acknowledge it was only a minor miracle.)
The three days in Napa were a booze-soaked blur. We drank barrels of beautiful liquids and fell in love with our driver Tom, a gravel-voiced Vietnam vet with a passion for grapes. I focused on the pleasure of risotto and cheese, and we went to French Laundry, where I ate marrow. I forgot about being engaged, except for a dip in my heart every morning when I remembered I was on a bittersweet last vacation. I managed to pretend everything was fine.
Until we got to Big Sur and the Post Ranch Inn.
When you arrive at Post Ranch, the concierge hands you a glass of wine, which you will carry with you into the Lexus SUV used to shuttle you to the tree house where you will be staying. It has a fireplace and a hot tub and an outdoor tub and it’s fucking nuts. A bellman shows you the location of the two cliff-side hot tubs, which overlook what looks like all of the Pacific Ocean at once. The concierge reminds you that if you want to use one of their Lexus convertibles, all you need to do is call the valet and it will be brought to your door, at any hour of the day or night. Yes, when you stay at Post Ranch you have free use of a Lexus. No one worries about a guest stealing a car, because why would anyone want to leave this place?
And it’s only when we sit on one of the many little white stone benches scattered along the bluff that I feel tears coming again. Unlike the baloney that everyone believes about the inevitability of getting engaged in Paris, here it is not bullshit. Getting engaged is the reason this place exists. Who wouldn’t think they were with their soul mate, even if it was a mistake, in a place like this? As we realized there were clouds rolling by BENEATH us, I could see Mike starting to feel just a bit sheepish about his decision not to propose here.
Over the next four days, I’d literally stew in the hot tubs; sometimes at dawn, sometimes at midnight. Here I was, a privileged speck soaking in one of the most awe-inspiring vistas in the world, and all I could do was text my friends about my relationship.
“This is what they do,” my friend Tracy texted me. “This is his process.” It was sunset, and I was sitting at the Post Ranch restaurant watching bats throw themselves against the huge floor-to-ceiling glass windows while Mike was in the bathroom.
“Help,” I had written to Tracy, and to my friend Jessica, and to my friend Wendy.
Jessica wrote me back the next morning, as I was looking at a giant redwood tree, one of the most majestic living things in the world. “This is so fucked,” she said. “Fuck him.” Mike was up ahead, fiddling with his camera. “Has this ever happened to anyone else you know?” I thumb-typed.
“Yes,” Jessica answered. “Literally every woman I know who’s gotten married has gone through this bullshit before they got engaged.” She went on to lay it down: “You need to not talk to him for a while. Don’t be aggressive, he just needs to be scared you’re leaving.”
I said I thought this sounded like a game.
“Trust me,” Jessica said.
I couldn’t believe that I was suddenly ensnared in the most humiliating relationship cliché of them all: the girlfriend giving an ultimatum. Jeanne Tripplehorn on the big cell phone, yelling at her dumb boyfriend to get his shit together.
Jenny texted me that Jessica was right. “This is just what guys do,” she said.
On our third Post Ranch day, I went for my Reiki appointment. Although I was happy for the hour-long break from Mike, I was not expecting any more enlightenment than I would from a Magic 8 Ball. I was greeted in the waiting room by “Saja,” who led me to the Reiki room, which was dark and filled with red and gold pillows and bronze bells.
She started the session by asking me if there was anything going on in my life I thought she might want to know about. I figured she probably didn’t really want to know about any of it, so I simply told her I was havi
ng a hard week. She said I shouldn’t expect to go into a trance or be hypnotized, but that at some point it might feel like I was dreaming. Whatever, Reiki lady. She rang a bell and started touching my back lightly; it wasn’t massage, as she was just barely grazing my skin with her fingertips. For five minutes I lay on my stomach with my head in the face cradle, thinking bitterly about what a waste of money this was, and trying not to think about how much this room looked like the set of Veronica’s Closet, until suddenly I felt like I was falling asleep. Except I knew I wasn’t. My eyes were open but I had the sensation that I was watching a film, and that I was not in control of what was being projected in front of me. The movie began with me in the ocean, out in open water, and then I became aware of being born out of my mother’s body. I met up with my first boyfriend, Pete, and we cried in each other’s arms and I forgave him for hurting me. I had a cat whom I fed by spilling milk out of a teacup directly onto the tile floor, and then I was left standing in my kitchen holding an empty teacup and wondering who would fill it again. Every image seemed like an unsolvable equation that the next image would somehow solve. This series of pictures floated in front of me for what felt like days, although really it was about forty-five minutes.
Then Saja rang another bell, and I “woke up.” I felt peaceful. We spoke about how I might want to try correcting the imbalances she’d felt between my masculine and feminine energy. I didn’t know what this meant but it didn’t matter, I loved Saja so much. I stumbled down the hallway toward the lobby, dizzy, but with a new understanding of the order of the universe. Everything made emotional sense.
And then I bumped into Rosie O’Donnell.
She was checking in for her massage or her Reiki session or maybe even her drum journey. She was wearing white jeans and a sweatshirt and sunglasses and her hair was a mess. It was like the polar bear from Lost had ambled into my childhood synagogue. What had, for a few tantalizing seconds, felt like a world in emotional order once again presented itself as unpredictable chaos. How was it possible that Rosie O’Donnell and I had both ended up in the same hippie spa in the middle of nowhere on this particular day? So many infinitesimally small decisions had to fall into place for us to cross paths. As I walked back to my glam tree house, occasionally hugging the side of the road to avoid a passing Lexus, I kept thinking about how the journey by which two people find each other and decide to make a life together must involve an accumulation of so many twists and turns for both. It’s a mystery as to how it all gets done.