by Michael Ryan
Instead of being at the church amid all that jollity and excess, I was here, in an unfurnished room with bare walls, with an absolute (unconscious) stranger beside me, completely happy with the choice I had made. Nor was I surprised by my happiness. Temporarily, at least, I had that feeling of dumb luck, of things turning out right despite my own bumbling and bewilderment. The sex I just had with Sabine made me see what a mistake I would have made by marrying Doris. Marrying Doris made sense. Doris was smart. Doris was attractive. Doris was generous. Doris was bicoastal. She helped my career. We shared interests. We had so much in common. I had every reason in the world to love Doris and I did love Doris. But I didn’t love Doris. I had to do what I had just done with Sabine in order to realize that. Of course a more responsible person might have chosen a more responsible means of self-realization than screwing an utter stranger on his wedding day. But I was clearly not a more responsible person. It didn’t really matter how Sabine felt about me when she woke up or even how I felt about her. It was as if my body were a separate creature I inhabited, and spoke to me a language I finally understood: it said, this is what was missing, you bozo. It’s what has been missing in you. Do not marry Doris. Don’t do that to her. Don’t do it to yourself.
What I did do to her (and to myself) by standing her up at the church had not fully descended upon me, as it would soon, in abundance. Besides the exhilaration of revelation, I felt the exhilaration of escape, not to mention the afterglow from the best sex I ever had with the sexiest woman I ever had it with. There was going to be plenty of downside to that as well, I suspected, since to the best of my knowledge there’s no free lunch. None of us get out of this world alive. Or unscathed. But there wasn’t much I could do at that moment about either what I had just done or what might happen in the future. What the hell. If I felt good, why not just let myself feel good? Why not just enjoy it?
So I was positively jaunty when I got up and went out to the living room. There was no furniture in it either, zero. On the far side of the house was the kitchen. It had zinc counters, and one of those twelve-burner chef’s stoves that goes for about twenty grand, and an Italian-hand-painted-tile island in the middle over which you hang your expensive copper pans on hooks and ignore the ho-hum spectacular ocean view as you chop your shallots—but otherwise the room was bare too, except for a single folding metal chair and a card table featuring a pair of prepackaged salt-and-pepper shakers, the kind used by struggling actors and graduate students and day laborers who live by themselves in rented rooms and heat canned chili on a hot plate. In the cupboard was one white plastic bowl and in a drawer was one white plastic spoon. There were four bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. I walked through all of them: completely empty. If there was a roommate, she didn’t eat or sleep on a bed. If there was no roommate then there was probably no producer or something. But why would Sabine lie about that?
Whatever the reason, I was already feeling less jaunty by the time I returned to the kitchen, where there was another phone on the wall and a twenty-four hour digital clock on the black German microwave: 18:59. One minute until my marriage. It was pointless to call anyone since they were all at the church, so I dialed my own answering machine. I have saved the tape, in case I’m ever asked to contribute to an exhibit of answering machine performance art. It starts with ho-ho ribbings and congratulations from some male friends, segues into quizzical and concerned inquiries from both genders as to my whereabouts, and finally becomes messages of outright distress from Doris. After a few messages, I skipped to six p.m. and this message from my best friend, Don:
Hey buddy. Nobody’s seen or heard from you all day, as I guess you know. Doris has been calling here, worried, not wanting to call you in case you were off contemplating the meaning of life or something. So when you get this message, call me. If you got the jitters, hey you should have seen me. I dropped so many Valium I thought I was marrying the minister. Who was not bad looking. And such a spiritual guy. Give a call, pal.
There were a few others, from friends whom Doris also apparently called looking for me. Then there were these three from Doris herself:
6:15: Robert, darling, you were supposed to pick Donald up five minutes ago so he is wondering where you are. We are all wondering, darling. Mother and I are driving to the church right now, so please call me on the car phone when you get this message. I’ve been so happy all day. I love you, honeypie. Bye-bye.
6:30: Honeypie, it’s six thirty p.m. We’re just getting off the 405 to Palos Verdes. Donald hasn’t heard from you, so he’s going to have to drive himself. Robert, are you all right? My God, what if something terrible has happened. If you get this message call me in the car in the next fifteen minutes. We’re all worried sick about you.
6:45: Robert, we’re about to call the police and the hospitals and there’s no trace of you anywhere. Where are you? I am absolutely frantic. We’re almost to the church, so you won’t be able to reach me in the car anymore. (Mother, how should Robert call me now? Well, doesn’t anybody have a freakin’ flip phone?) Robert, call my machine, I’ll check it every five minutes. This is a hell of a way to get married, you shitweasel. You better be in some hospital unconscious, or I’m going to put you there myself.
This was what I loved about Doris. She was, as we say, up front with her emotions. What you see is what you get. No apologies for it either. Ever. Whereas I tend to be perversely involuted and brooding and self-questioning. This is one reason our friends thought we were so good for each other, on the old opposites attract, two-lovers-make-one-being Platonic principle. They thought I could use her drive and efficiency (which I did) and she could use my introspection and detachment (which she didn’t). To Doris’s credit, she was usually patient with me, if sometimes a little too obviously so. “What would you do without me?” was one of her favorite lines, delivered with a genuinely affectionate smile. Well, I was about to find out, and so was she.
But I had never wanted to hurt her, and I was hurting her badly. If I knew her at all, she would be vindictive. This thought sent a chill through me, as I stood there in my birthday suit in Sabine’s designer kitchen, although the chill might have come from an evening breeze off the ocean. After the sun goes down in Southern California, the temperature drops ten degrees in ten minutes. It was getting dark out now. I could see my reflection just beginning to show up in the window. I must say I was an estimable assemblage of beef. I watched my diet and worked out like a troglodyte. If you were going to do stand-up (which I was, and did—God help me—for the last fifteen years), in front of an audience who has carte blanche to check you out for their pleasure (whatever it may be), you’d better look either good or ridiculous, and I had never wished to look ridiculous (despite the evidence of recent behavior). As Billy Crystal/Fernando said so immortally, “It is better to look good than to feel good.” And I sure didn’t feel good. Whatever happened with Sabine, I could find another woman. I didn’t have to jump into anything. I’d be okay. And so would Doris. But hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and even Shakespeare could not have imagined Doris, who’d no doubt update his idea to megatonnage for the nuclear age. I just hoped she couldn’t get her hands on a Stinger missile. She had never kept an emotion inside herself in her life so it wasn’t likely she would do so with this behemoth. She’d take it right out on me. Big time. Some people in this situation might console themselves by asking, “What’s the worst she can do?” In my case, this question was not consoling. I have seen her reduce omnipotent studio executives to trembling blobs of ectoplasm. Doris’s worst was just this side of Armageddon and she’d be both thorough and relentless in executing it (and me).
This still didn’t excuse what I had done to her. I didn’t know if it would be more considerate to leave her a message or not. The phone was still in my hand. Maybe as much for that reason as any other, I dialed her number. When her answering machine picked up, I said:
Doris, this is Robert. I guess you know who it is. I didn’t plan to do this, bu
t I believe it’s for the best that we not be married. At least we didn’t make that mistake. I’m sorry I didn’t realize it sooner. I know you’ll be all right. I hope someday you’ll be able to forgive me.
When I hung up, I noticed Sabine was standing across the kitchen on the other side of the island. She had on a white silk robe and thick black-rimmed glasses, so I thought for a moment she was someone else, and I must have jumped.
“Just me,” she said. “I live here.”
I almost said, “Really? It doesn’t look like it,” but smiled instead. It wasn’t my business, yet, where she lived or how. She certainly didn’t live here. But maybe she had just moved in? Or out? Or something.
She propped her elbows on the Italian-hand-painted-tile island and cupped her chin in her hands, cutely.
“I think I’ll just admire the view,” she said looking me up and down. It made me remember I was naked.
“I guess I’ll go put on some clothes.”
“I brought you a robe.” It was also white silk. Large. A man’s size. Whose was it? She held it like a coat for me to slide my arms into the sleeves. While my back was to her, she said, “That was a classy message you left your fiancée.”
“Classy? If you say so. I did just inconvenience her somewhat.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t whine. You didn’t say anything false. I like that.”
“I’m glad you like it. I don’t think Doris will,” I said, facing Sabine and cinching the robe at the waist.
She looked at me with that ironic grin.
“Are we feeling a little guilt?” she asked. “Are we feeling a little postcoital tristesse?”
Postcoital tristesse? Who was this woman?
“As a matter of fact, we are not,” I answered.
“Good, because I’m not either.” She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me hard and long. It had authority, no question about it. She said, “I don’t know what it is about you, Robert, but you do something to me that goes deep down.”
“You, too,” I said. I meant it. And it was not just a little scary. It may have been a power like this I had always avoided.
“No, I really mean it,” she said and kissed me again, expertly, perfectly, instantly transforming my knees into Silly Putty.
She stepped back but kept hold of my hand and looked at me for a long moment, as if she were memorizing me.
“Maybe we were together in another life,” she said. Ironically?
“Which life would that be?” I asked.
“The next one.”
Okay, she’s a nut case, I thought. But what did I have to lose? I had just torched my last life pretty thoroughly. I may as well be with her in the next one—whichever planet she lived on.
“So now what?” she asked, returning us to earth.
“Now what what?” I said. “I believe my calendar has been cleared for this evening.”
“It’s Friday, I don’t have to work tomorrow.”
“Yeah?”
“Why don’t you take me on a honeymoon?”
“To Baja,” I said.
“Why not? It’s already paid for, isn’t it? The bridal suite with the wet bar and the heart-shaped Jacuzzi.”
“I don’t think I want to do that,” I said.
“At the risk of repeating myself: Why not?”
“It seems disrespectful.”
“To whom? Doris is not going to care. She’s not going to know.”
“To me, I guess. It seems disrespectful to myself.” Was I suddenly developing a compunction? I might have to reorganize my entire personality.
“Hmm,” she said, the way she had in the bank when she decided to take my ride home. I could hear the wheels clicking inside her brain. She took off her glasses and rubbed the lenses on her robe, pulling it up by the hem and featuring her bare legs. It made me realize that I was leaving a very significant piece of evidence out of this argument.
“Well,” she said, “this is the first time I’ve ever had to try to pester a man into shacking up with me for a weekend. And here I already packed my swimsuit.”
She dropped her robe from her shoulders and there it was: the Brazilian bikini with the butt-floss bottom, red as the devil himself. She turned and walked a few steps with her arms held out, in parody of a runway model (or a stripper), the whole time grinning as if she were pulling the trick of the week. The tattoo was there, too, right under the curvature of her butt, at about Rio de Janeiro on the globe, southern latitude thirty degrees, only it wasn’t a black snake but a tiny broken heart the size of a dime. I didn’t even mention it.
“Baja it is,” I said.
“Robert, really?” She threw her arms around me. “We are going to have such a great time!”
3.
I did not have such a great time. More accurately, I had a great time, then a terrible time, and then a weird time, good in its way if you like emotional high colonics. I prefer my emotions more gently purged. The great time was driving down to Baja and having sex again and falling asleep. On the way out of LA we grabbed a bag of Fatburgers and a bottle of champagne, which Sabine insisted on paying for. When I asked why, she said, “I’m trying to get into your pants.” I responded, “If you were any more into my pants, you’d be wearing them yourself.” In fact, what she was wearing was a workout outfit—halter top and spandex shorts—underneath a bright purple sport coat that just covered her butt. Her traveling suit. Legs up to her ears. When we stopped for the burgers she was shouted and whistled at; a carload of teenagers drummed the side of their car; outside the wine store where she bought the champagne, a beggar who looked like he should be in the ER on life support made kiss-noises at her. When we got back into the car, I stupidly asked her how that kind of attention made her feel. She said, “What attention?” She didn’t notice it anymore, or so she claimed. I asked her about when men were more intrusive than that, when they approached her on the street or followed her or tried to touch her. She said she knew how to take care of herself. What I thought of as haughtiness when I first saw her in the bank now seemed more like defiance, a defiance that I myself would find exhausting to maintain. I said something to that effect which I thought sounded feminist and empathetic, but she reacted irritably. “Would you rather I dressed like a nun?” she asked. That was the end of that subject.
I was still feeling lucky though. I had dropped Sparky at the kennel that morning on the way to the bank, and Sabine talked me into not zipping by my house and packing a suitcase, so I’d be beachcombing in Baja in my L.L. Bean rain gear. What did it matter? I was so happy to be with her and not to face my torched life for a couple of days I would have gone to Baja in a hazmat suit. It did seem odd that she was in such a hurry to get on the road: no stopping for dinner, no picking up my stuff. She herself virtually cleaned out her closet in about ten minutes. Four big suitcases, the kind you have to pull on wheels, not including the pillow-sized black leather purse. Okay, it’s a girl thing, I thought. Doris wouldn’t cross the street without a three-season wardrobe and enough cosmetics to last her a decade into senescence.
But the other oddity was that after Sabine downed her burger and a few hits of champagne she fell asleep and stayed asleep until we got to the hotel in Baja. Six hours. It was as if she had been hit with a hammer. When you don’t know someone, you don’t know whether their behavior is unusual for them or not. For example, Doris, who always displayed carpet-bomber efficiency, used a whole roll of toilet paper every time she went to the bathroom. All the trees of the world began to scream in unison each time she had to pee. Maybe Sabine always fell asleep as if she were hit with a hammer. But even with our nap earlier it seemed she hadn’t slept for a week. At one point after we crossed the border, she mumbled, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” and, a half hour later, “Don’t do it, Softy.” Don’t do it softly? I was sure she said Softy. Who was Softy? The producer? I thought I had plenty of time to find out about that, about why she had lied about the roommate. Anyway, if all we were going to do
was hump like puppies, it would be fine with me if she had a boyfriend who spent lots of time in Africa, especially if he were named “Softy.” It would mean I wouldn’t have to get too involved either, and maybe I needed a break after ten years with Doris of Relationship Building and Communication Skills. God, we had tried hard. The xeroxed handouts from all the weekend couples’ seminars Doris and I attended together made a stack that would reach the moon. Doris’s personal library on the subject would fill a wing of the Library of Congress if they collect titles like Women Who Are Just Too Nice, Seven Warning Signs He Can’t Commit, and How To Get More Love From Him (And Everything Else). She also bought the tapes, the videos, the CD-ROMs, and an interactive computer game we played with joysticks, the object of which was not to defeat your opponent but to work together in harmony through obstacles presented by the pressures and demands of daily life. We spent so much money on couples’ therapy we could have bought the Los Angeles Lakers instead. The Lakers would have probably done more for our relationship. (I understand Shaquille O’Neal is a very empathetic person.) The phrase, “What I’m hearing Doris say to you, Robert . . .” makes me instantly narcoleptic. I fall asleep, boom, just like Sabine did after she finished her hamburger. That phrase has etched by far the deepest groove in my brain, way deeper than more superficial instincts such as food, sex, survival, and breathing.
As you might be able to tell, our Relationship Building was a recurring subject of my stand-up routine, and, to Doris’s credit, that was fine with her. She didn’t care if I spilled the intimate details of our life to whoever was willing to pay a ten-dollar cover and two-drink minimum. It was art. She respected it. Maybe some of her generosity was compensatory, since she made her money from “novelizations,” that miscreant of literary genres. She was the agent who put together the deal. She hired the writers, she wrote the contract, she designed the publicity campaign. Whenever a big movie comes out and the same day you notice at the supermarket checkout stand the unlikely and previously nonexistent novel of that title with the star’s picture on the cover, that is the promo work of Doris. Fortunately she did not commission the Jane Austen movies to be novelized. But she did everything else for the paperback of Sense And Sensibility with Emma Thompson’s picture on the cover that put it on the best-seller list for a couple of weeks until people realized there were so many words inside, and pretty darn big ones at that. The novel of Pocahontas totaled about thirty sentences, none of them complex or compound, and did much better. But it didn’t really matter. As long as the cover was right and the book was where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be there, it sold. And Doris made dump trucks full of money. Boxcars full. Toxic waste dumps full. It was more lucrative than murdering drifters for their kidneys.