The Sleeping Beauty Proposal

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  Did I push? No. Even after the FedEx guy started accepting Hugh’s signature in lieu of mine and my answering machine said, “Hugh and I can’t come to the phone,” not once did I bring up the M word. I was so incredibly not that way.

  Though plenty of women in my situation might have been that way. Might have feigned a pregnancy like Connie, a woman (shrew) I work with, who drew a tiny + sign in pink magic marker on her pregnancy test and left it by the toilet. (Not such a hot idea. Her loser boyfriend found the test, stepped outside to get the paper, and was never seen again.)

  Nor did I leave the New York Times Weddings section about or conduct long, loud phone calls with Patty about my aging ovaries and whatnot.

  Instead, I continued to play it cool. I shrugged when Hugh coyly asked if I ever thought about getting married. (A classic commitment-phobic boyfriend test to see if you’re out to trap him, in my opinion. Don’t fall for it!) I even managed to convince myself that marriage was not all that it was cut out to be.Women of our generation had no need for the financial support of men. Why be burdened when I could be free?

  One day while we were lying by the Charles after a run, we finally had the Big Discussion and I learned Hugh had a “position” on marriage. It was this: Being unmarried keeps us fresh.

  Turned out Todd, my older brother, had a corollary: Being unmarried keeps Hugh’s options open.

  "Mine, too,” I said, defensively.

  To which Todd snorted, “Right. You want to get married, Genie, and you know it. The only reason why a man in his late thirties doesn’t want to commit is because he thinks, hopes, that there’s something better around the corner. I know. I am that thirty-seven -year-old man.”

  It hurt. And for a while I was mad at Todd for being such a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. Marriage was passé. Anyone with any intelligence knew that. Just because Hugh and I didn’t have a slip of paper didn’t mean we weren’t committed to one another.

  Like Hugh said, marriage was an anachronism left over from the days of tribal politics. (I have absolutely no idea what that means.) Our bond, he said, didn’t need approval from the state. (Or commonwealth.We were in Massachusetts, after all.)

  Besides, Hugh was working his heart out, teaching by day and drafting a new novel at night, a novel he needed to be a smashing bestseller so he could quit academics and write full-time. He was exhausted.Testy. It would have been unfair of me to pester him at this crucial point in his career with my neurotic whining about children and hobbling on the beach and just how long he planned on keeping his options open, anyway.

  So I was patient. And my patience was rewarded with more abundance than I ever could have hoped for.

  Hugh hit it big with his novel Hopeful, Kansas, a delightfully sappy romance about a handsome drama student named Dick Credo who’s bent on becoming famous and who never noticed Dora Schlubb, the girl who tutored him in math and who secretly had a huge crush on him.

  Dick Credo leaves his Kansas hometown of Hopeful, goes to Hollywood and becomes a megastar, and then is felled by drugs and alcohol and his reputation is ruined. So he ends up back in Hopeful and wouldn’t you know that Dora, the girl who tutored him in math, is still carrying the proverbial torch.

  She helps him heal and he sobers up and realizes he missed his true calling to become mayor of Hopeful and clean up all the Hopeful crime and marry the nerdy girl. Only, right before their wedding, Dora’s diagnosed with some mysterious and quick-killing disease—but she keeps it from Dick—and she collapses into his arms at the altar,“her face as pale as the virginal white wedding dress she had saved for herself and for him.”

  She didn’t even get to ... you know ... with Dick, the Brad Pitt of Hopeful, Kansas. (If you ask me, there was more going on with Dick than just drugs and alcohol. But that’s another book for another day.)

  Anyway, Hugh’s book landed smack at number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and suddenly People magazine was interviewing him and he turned into an overnight celebrity, a kind of literary hottie.There were even groupies.

  His publisher sent him on a book tour for three weeks, during which there were lots of questions from nosy journalists about which he preferred, boxers or briefs. (I would think to myself, “I know.”) And then there were the questions about me, which he handled artfully.

  He’d say, “I have found the love of my life. We have a relationship that no novel, no matter how great, could do justice. It’s the kind of love that makes my passion burn with unquenchable desire.”

  I would swoon whenever I read that. I couldn’t wait for him to come home so I could rip off his clothes and personally quench his flames.

  Hugh’s last stop on the book tour was an appearance on whatever the show is with Barbara Walters. Barbara ended the interview with what would become the question that changed my life: “Are you ever going to marry your own Dora?”

  I was on the edge of my seat. I could not believe what was happening before my very eyes, especially when Hugh said he would ask “Dora” to be his wife if he could be assured the answer would be yes.

  Eeeeeek!

  Well, of course the answer would be yes, silly. I wanted to reach out and grab him through the screen and shake him by the neck.That’s when Barbara held up her finger, as if she’d just had a brilliant idea, and said, “Hugh. Why don’t you ask her right now, here on live television? Ask your Dora to marry you.”

  My heart stopped. My vision became tunnel as I stared, riveted, at the screen. This would be a moment we’d describe to our children (Meg, Beth, and Amy), and that Meg, Beth, and Amy would pass down for generations.

  Hugh hemmed and blushed some more. Then, at Barbara’s cajoling, he faced the camera and said, “You know how much I love you, my Dora. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since the moment we met. While I’ve been away, I’ve been consumed, obsessed, desperate to hold you, touch you, kiss your soft, warm lips.”

  Really? That’s funny, because he only called once a day to ask if he had any voice mail and to make sure Jorge got his insulin shots.

  “You know how much I admire perfection and you, sweet, are perfection personified. I feel like I will die unless you tell me yes, that you will be my wife so I can be your husband until death do us part. Make me happy, my love, like no one has until you. Marry me.”

  Barbara was weeping like a hog over a trough of hot slop.Tears were streaming down her cheeks and mine, too. It was The Most Beautiful Thing Ever. Ever!! I’d never heard Hugh so poetic. The imagery.The passion.

  “Yes!” I screamed into the universe. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  The phone blared and I leaped off the couch.This was it! This was it! This was Hugh asking me to marry him mano a mano. Finally, after four long years, my prince had come.

  I snatched up the receiver, my hand shaking with anticipation. I could barely breathe.

  "Honeee.You should turn on the TV...”

  My mother! I couldn’t believe it. Her incredibly bad timing is legendary. "Mom. I can’t talk now.”

  “You should turn on Barbara Walters. Hugh’s on and he just proposed marriage. I think to you, dear. Wait. He’s back.”

  I hung up the phone and spun around to the TV. Sure enough, there was Hugh. He was on the phone. He was grinning and smiling and there was Barbara Walters saying something I couldn’t quite comprehend, something about “his Dora” saying yes and all the people at 20/20 wishing the couple the very best on their journey through life.

  Holy crow. My prince had come.

  And ... gone!

  Chapter Two

  My phone rang. Again, I flinched and thought with stupid hope, “Hugh?”

  But it wasn’t Hugh because the phone was my cell and it was playing “Show Me the Way.” Patty had bought the ringtone off a Peter Frampton fan site online.

  I pressed send. “You’re answering,” she said cautiously.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not talking to Hugh.”

  “No.”

&n
bsp; “You’re finished talking to Hugh?”

  "Hugh never called.”

  "No Hugh?”

  “No Hugh.”

  Pause.

  “I’ll be right over. Don’t do anything until I get there.”

  I snapped the phone shut and inched to the couch, every part of me feeling cold and numb as I digested Patty’s two simple words. No Hugh. Still, I couldn’t grasp their meaning, as if they were Chinese or Hebrew, which was odd because I was a smart woman. Not brilliant. But not paper-or-plastic either. I could calculate a tip and do my taxes.Why wasn’t this making sense?

  We were practically a married couple already, Hugh and I.This was a known and accepted fact around Thoreau College. If you invited Hugh to a cocktail party, you automatically invited me. My picture was on his desk. He was number 2 on my speed dial and I was number 2 on his. People asked what “we” were doing the following weekend. My mechanic knew Hugh better than he knew me because it was Hugh who brought in my car for oil changes.

  Hugh took out my trash and cleaned Jorge’s litter box. I’d thrown up once on his shoes and he didn’t care. I got him ginger ale and Gatorade and changed his bloody cotton balls when he had his wisdom teeth pulled. I kept him from making long-distance phone calls to Malaysia while hopped up on Percocet. I even washed his boxers and, being an amateur skin care expert thanks to that Cosmo article, checked for moles in places where he never looked.We shared that kind of intimacy.

  But tonight I’d learned that he was even more intimate with some other woman, someone more beautiful and thrilling, someone who sparked his passion, drove him mad with desire. Someone he fervently wanted to be his wife.

  I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since the moment we met.... I’ve been consumed, obsessed, desperate to hold you, touch you, kiss your soft, warm lips.

  Memories of his proposal were starting to rise to the surface of my consciousness, swirling and buzzing around my mind like a swarm of locusts.

  Make me happy, my love, like no one has until you.

  What was he implying, that I hadn’t made him happy? I who had rubbed his back until my fingers were numb and done all the cooking while he wrote the book? I who had copyedited his stupid manuscript, organized his checkbook, and made sure he had clean shirts and lint-free jackets for teaching? I who had scrubbed his toilet?

  If it hadn’t been for me, why, I bet that damned book wouldn’t have been half as successful. I can tell you this much: His first draft sucked and would have continued to suck if I hadn’t showed him how to turn Dora into a real woman instead of a stereotypical shy Kansas farm girl with “down-turned eyes” and a “sweetheart’s smile.”

  Yuk and double yuk.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. Despite Patty’s orders to stay put and not do a thing, I called Hugh on my cell. I had to. I was going out of my mind.

  He answered on the fifth ring sounding slightly rushed. “Hugh Spencer.”

  A big red bubble of anger popped inside me. “What just happened?”

  There was a pause that telepathically I inferred as Oh, shit.

  “Genie,” he said. “Let me call you back. Now’s not—”

  “Don’t even think about hanging up. For once be a man and be honest. Did you or did you not just propose to someone else?”

  When he spoke next, he sounded different, as if he’d gone into a bathroom or maybe a closet. “The truth is ... I did.”

  My other hand clenched into a fist. This was impossible. The logistics alone were unfathomable. Four years of constant togetherness and somehow he’d found another woman whom he loved enough to marry? It didn’t make sense.

  “Who?”

  “Really, Genie.We can talk about this—”

  "Who?” I needed a name, a face, an enemy on which to focus my rage and pain.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen right now. I was put on the spot and I was going to say no, but then the moment kind of hit me and—”

  “WHO?”

  My front door opened and Patty walked in. Patty is short. Not midget short, but short. She has shoulder-length reddish hair that curls at her shoulders thanks to lots of expensive treatments that keep it from looking and feeling like Brillo.And she has big eyes and an upturned nose. She often reminds me of a Hummel figurine gone bad.

  “Hugh?” she mouthed.

  I nodded and pressed the speaker button on my phone so she could hear him.

  She flipped him the bird. Then she proceeded to pull out two shot glasses from her humongous Tod’s Tribu Shopper along with a very pricey bottle of tequila. It was going to be a nasty night.

  “Who she is is not important, Genie.”

  “I’ll be the judge of whether or not it’s important for me to know who you’ve been sleeping with while we were, supposedly, in a committed relationship.”

  Patty’s eyes widened.

  “The operative word,” he said, becoming testy,“being supposedly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You pushed me to be committed.You wanted to be committed. You told your parents we were committed, the entire school we were committed. But ... I never said I was committed to you.”

  The words hung in the air, frozen and crystallized. I never said I was committed to you. It was as if a flaying knife had sliced through my sternum and cut me in two.

  Patty slapped her forearm in an Italian gesture of revenge. I shook myself, came to my senses, and realized he was still talking, perversely pressing his point, releasing pent-up anger that must have been boiling inside him for months.

  “The difference between being with you and being with her is that I couldn’t wait to be committed to her. This is what love is supposed to feel like, Genie. Empowering. Unquenchable. It’s not supposed to feel like you’re a wild animal, tagged and trapped, dying to be free.”

  “And that is how you felt with me?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  Silence. Patty had poured the shots and was waiting on the couch. “Scum,” she mouthed.

  I wanted to get off the phone and collapse and cry, but didn’t dare hang up. Likely, he wouldn’t be answering any more calls from my number and, besides, he was flying to England the next day to finish his book tour.This was my last chance to uncover the truth in all its sordid nastiness.

  I wanted to ask what made her so great that he wanted to commit, but it sounded too clingy, too The Way We Were. So, I said, “Tell me she’s not one of your freshmen, because I’d hate to think I was the cover for some dirty old man.”

  “Who she is, how we met, how long we’ve been seeing each other, these are all irrelevant questions. You’re missing the larger issue, the one that involves us.”

  Patty shook her head and said, “Bullshit.”

  “She is the symptom, not the cause, of our breakdown.”

  I’ve always despised that line. It’s so phony. “Oh, and what would you say is the cause of our breakdown?”

  “Please, Genie. Let’s not go into this now. Give each of us some time to cool off and get ourselves together so we don’t inadvertently say something we’ll regret later.”

  My eyes felt hot and swollen and before I could help it, a few tears escaped and ran down my cheeks. Patty’s cool hand grasped my hot one and gave it a squeeze. He must not find out he’d made me cry. "I know the cause of our so-called breakdown,” I blubbered. “It’s that you’re a jerk.”

  To this, Hugh exhaled a long, pained sigh. “Look, Genie.You know you’re my best friend.There’s no other person in the world who understands me so well, whom I can go to with any problem. You’re my rock, right?”

  "But?” I knew there had to be a but in there somewhere.

  “But ...” He cleared his throat. “No matter how much I love you as a friend, the bottom line is that, at the end of the day, I’m simply not as sexually attracted to you as I should be.”

  Oh, God. That was worse than I expected. The floodgates had opened and, collapsing onto the couch, I let t
he tears come. Patty put her arm around me and made me rest my head on her tiny shoulder.

  “Not now?” I managed to say. "Or not ever.”

  “Actually, to be totally honest, never.”

  That was it. I was gone. Big heaping sobs erupted from within me and there was no use choking them back.

  “It’s not anything you or I can help. It’s pure chemistry. I’ve tried and tried to get past it, but I’m a man, you know, and the funny thing is that even though I consider myself more of a cerebral person”—he laughed nervously—“I still have these physical needs.”

  Like kindling tossed into a fire, whatever was left of my feminine confidence at that moment curled, shriveled, and burst into flames, leaving only a small pile of gray ashes. I didn’t have the power or presence of mind to counter an attack, to wittily retort that maybe he wasn’t man enough to bring out the woman in me or to wiggle my little finger, like Patty was always doing, to signal “inadequate” men with outsize egos.

  I was flattened.

  Because, aside from the way it worked in some out-of-the-way places in Kenmore Square, as far as I knew, sex was supposed to be between two people who loved and trusted one another. And I had trusted him. So trusted him that while I had been kissing and wriggling and licking and slithering all over Hugh, assuming I was hotter than Tabasco, I never imagined he had been merely lying back and thinking of England.

  "Oh,” I whispered, recovering a bit, though my shoulders were still heaving.

  “I’m sorry. I never wanted to tell you that. Ever. It’s just that you put me on the spot.”

  Yes. It was all my fault. Right.

  Patty lifted a shot and raised a suggestive eyebrow. I shook her off. Later, maybe. For now I needed to be alert.

  “Look,” he said softly.“There will probably be questions about what happened and since I’m going home for several weeks, I won’t be here to answer them. I’m sorry that you’ll have to bear the brunt of this.”

  I hadn’t even thought of this possibility—of my family and friends and all the people we knew at Thoreau, not to mention the press even, contacting me, asking if I was thrilled and if there was an engagement ring and whether we had set a date.