The Sleeping Beauty Proposal

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  And with that, I help myself to one of Jason’s martinis, a certain risk if there ever was one.

  Chapter Seven

  So, that’s it. I guess I’m officially on the road to marriage. Let the chips fall where they will.

  This is my new attitude as I leave my apartment Monday morning for the hike down Trapelo Road to pick up the number 73 bus. Now that I’ve given over to this concept of being engaged, of taking a risk, I feel different, free, as if anything is possible, good or bad. Though I’m not expecting bad. I’m betting on good. Absolutely good all the way.

  Possibly, my spirit of optimism is due to the day itself, a sparkling warm June morning bursting with rebirth. The trees are now leafy and green, the daffodils have given way to rosebuds, wet wash is already on the lines, sprinklers are starting up, and, better yet, the kids are out of school. No more hordes of shouting, pushing teenagers deafened by white iPod buds to battle at the bus stop.

  The air smells fresh and new, earthy. I could sprint to the bus, I’m so charged. I’m more than charged. I’m electric!

  Really electric. This morning I bounded out of bed, fed and watered Jorge, shot him up with insulin, and deposited him outside to sit in the exact same spot until I came home from work to take him inside.After that I made my bed with dime-tight hospital corners, executed fifty sit-ups and fifty leg lifts while watching a rerun of The Daily Show, and did not stop once to think about being alone in a coat closet with Jon Stewart.

  Showered with almond soap, exfoliated, shaved my legs and other parts. Chose a nice flowered sundress—the first of the season—and strappy sandals since we’re allowed to “dress alternatively” during the summer. Blow-dried my hair and contemplated for the umpteenth time turning up the blond in my highlights. (Hugh was aghast at this suggestion since bleached blondes reminded him of scary German girls who used to sit on him at Turkish resorts. He much preferred my subtle honey brown. So much less threatening.)

  Yes. I definitely should get highlights.

  Then it was coffee with cream, no sugar (a holdover from my Atkins days), oatmeal, half a banana, and a review of my scheduled interviews: a Phoebe Shambo from Hanover, New Hampshire, and a Kara Weeks from Chicago. I hardly ever get the boys.They’re too coveted. Those go to Bill, my boss, or his right-hand man, Kevin, the prodigy.

  Yet, this morning not even my office’s sexism can get me down. I am too ... Zen. This is my new philosophy. From now on, I am not going to worry about pretending to be engaged or the resulting consequences down the road (outrageous, expensive wedding being planned by mother/sister, Hugh finding out and going ballistic).

  No.

  I have resolved that life’s troubles will henceforth be nothing but a tangent touching me at one infinitesimal point. Worrying is banished from my personal vocabulary, having served no purpose in the first place. (Worrying, that is, not a personal vocabulary.)

  In fact, a case could be made that worrying about a problem actually prevents you from resolving it, because it deceives your mind into thinking that you’re doing something when really you’re not. Not only that, but worrying is super bad for your skin. Yes, I refuse to worry from here on out.

  Take this latest crisis over Hugh. Naturally, I could wring my hands over him. I could stay up all night and call my friends and drown my woes in mint chip ice cream as I privately hash and rehash that line about him not being attracted to me sexually. (It still stabs me to the core. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover.)

  But I’ve done the ice-cream-and-whining routine with other breakups in the past and nothing changed. The guy who dumped me did not come back begging for forgiveness. He did not see the folly of his ways and prostrate himself at my feet. Instead, the sun set and rose again, day after day, the wounds healed, and eventually the man who had previously been the sunshine of my existence faded into a dim and dusty memory.

  This is the gift of thirtysomething heartbreak, I think. It’s not so life and death, unlike when I was twenty-two and I went to pieces because the man I’d slept with on Saturday hadn’t called me by Sunday night. Back then I had to cook up all sorts of justifications for his silence (or, rather, rudeness): Work had piled up, his dog had died, his phone had been disconnected. Okay, so that last one made him sound a bit slack-jawed. Still, it could happen. Phones get disconnected every day for the oddest of reasons.

  With Hugh, it’s different. Already, I have put him behind me like a childhood best friend from summer camp or a freshman roommate. I’m even having trouble remembering what he looks like or what we did together for four years.

  Though, I have to admit, I am kind of curious why he hasn’t at least e-mailed, especially with my parents calling Pippa and all.

  Not that I miss him. I don’t. It’s just that I would think he’d want to check how I was, at least to see if I’d recovered from the breakup. Or to inquire about Jorge and what I’ve done with the small collection of Hugh’s winter clothes I stored under my bed in a zipper bag and if I still have his great-grandfather’s gold cuff links in my bedside drawer.

  Certainly, he must have been alarmed to find that my parents were calling his parents to congratulate them on our upcoming nuptials.

  “Quite startling, really,” is something I can imagine Susanna Spencer saying about Mom. “Such a brazen woman, claiming her daughter was marrying you, Hugh. Do you suppose she was just completely blotto?”

  If I’d been in his shoes, I’d have been on the phone tout de suite.

  Then again, these are Hugh’s parents we’re talking about and they are—let’s see, how to put this—completely bizarre.

  Who sends a six-year-old miles away to boarding school in Scotland? If your answer is the British, you’d be correct. But not all British. Certain types of British, like Susanna and Trevor Spencer. People who “hunt” in tweed clothing nice enough for church, people who travel to estates for weekend-long parties and ski on Alps that are French. I don’t even think Trevor works. He does have an office in London, but from what I’ve been able to discern, it’s more like a base station for tête-à-têtes in Knightsbridge.

  It always broke my heart to think of little Hugh in his little navy short pants and little beanie waving, “Good-bye, Mummie,” as his nanny—yes, his nanny—led him to the train.

  “It was all very jolly,” he explained to me one night. “Rather good for the fortification of one’s upper lip.” Here’s a tip: No six-year -old should need a stiff upper lip.

  Then he told the story of how, suffering from chicken pox at age seven and slightly delirious, he lay in the boarding school infirmary and tried to think pleasant thoughts about what Mummie smelled like. (“Couldn’t quite get it right, unfortunately. Kept wanting her to smell like cinnamon and kept coming up Dunhills.”)

  That pitiful Victorian tale was so sad, I wished for a time machine so I could turn back the clock and rescue the enfant Hugh alone in the St. Bart’s Nasty School for Unfortunate Rich Boys. But when I dangled it out there that perhaps his mother might have been a tad neglectful, Hugh immediately rose to her defense, claiming she hadn’t neglected him in the slightest because she’d had Nanny send up a box of special tea and lemon drops that the St. Bart’s nursing staff took for themselves, arguing candy wasn’t good for sick children.

  I apologized and assured him this did mean his mum loved him desperately. Secretly, however, I vowed that if I ever were in the position of being in charge of Susanna Spencer’s care, I would see to it that she lay alone in an infirmary and tried to recall what someone dear to her smelled like, too.

  Okay. So I might have gone a bit overboard with that one.

  Anyway, no use sweating the St. Bart’s chicken pox drama. There’s some other woman to look after Hugh now, to hold him in the middle of the night and be the mummie he never had.

  To be fair, Hugh never did treat me like his mother. Far from it. The first night we ever slept together was perhaps one of the most erotic nights of my life. It happened entirely by accident, which, I’m
afraid to say, is always the best way. (Sorry, Planned Parenthood.)

  We’d been dating for about a month when a freak November snowstorm blanketed Boston and we were stranded in his apartment, which, granted, was above a funeral home, but which also had a spectacular, working fireplace.

  There were a few sticks of wood, enough for a small fire. However, we had no food aside from some grapes, crackers, two cans of Progresso clam chowder, and a superb cabernet.To us it was a feast. We drank and ate and talked until the fire died down and snow knocked the power out, and suddenly Hugh was kissing me on the couch in a way I’d never been kissed, ever.

  Before I could say “Wait, hold on, not quite ready,” he had nuzzled down the collar of my sweater and his lips were exploring my neck.After that, all I remember is sinking into that deep bed of his with the cream duvet and the 1,000-thread-count sheets. We stayed there for two days until New England Power turned on the lights and the heat cranked up.

  I used to think our decadent weekend in bed was because I drove Hugh mad with desire, that he couldn’t help making long, slow, passionate love to me over and over and over.

  Now, in light of his latest revelation, I realize he was just trying to stay warm.

  “Genie?”

  It’s Frank, the bearded driver of the number 73 who smells like bagels and lox and garlic. “Monday morning daydream?”

  “Something like that.” I flip him my pass and get on.

  “Don’t worry. Friday’s just around the corner. See if you can hang on ’til then.”

  I like Thoreau best in the summer when the campus is quiet and lush. Aside from some lingering students and the occasional conference attendees, it’s practically empty.

  That’s not counting the tours.The tours and tours of prospective freshmen and anxious parents being led around by various admissions interns to Billings Hall (where Admissions is located), Fillmore Library, the Student Center, and the pièce de résistance— the Sports Complex (heated Olympic-size swimming pool, sixteen tennis courts, racquetball, squash, weight room, Jacuzzi, sauna, and even, I am told, massage by appointment).

  Not for nothing was Thoreau voted by Rolling Stone magazine as the finest four-year, four-season resort east of Las Vegas.

  Alice, our secretary, is fiddling with a window air conditioner when I enter her first-floor office to get my mail. She has leaped into the summer season with both feet by donning a short, short white miniskirt. Her subdued navy cap-sleeve sweater and faux pearls are for the parents who will never see the tattoo of Chinese characters over her left breast or her tiny silver ankle bracelet with its not-so-innocent charms.

  I attempt ultimate nonchalance. “Hey, Alice. Have a good weekend?”

  Usually, this sets her off as Alice is obsessed with Fridays and Saturdays and can discuss them endlessly. From Monday until Wednesday at noon she can run a nonstop monologue about what she did the previous weekend. At some point on Wednesday, usually during lunch, this train of thought abruptly switches to what she will do the upcoming weekend, reaching a crescendo of planning around three on Friday, when she knocks off early.

  “The better question is, how was your weekend?” she says provocatively.

  "Um, okay.”

  I can feel her gaze boring into me as I check my box for Saturday’s mail and flip through various meaningless Bill Gladstone memos about upcoming meetings and retreat dates, memos that I will round-file in the privacy of my own office.Then I take a deep breath, tuck my mail under my arm, and say with exasperation, “Mondays.What a drag!”

  “Not so fast.” Alice snags my left hand. “Where’s the ring?”

  “What ring?”

  “Don’t play dumb. We all know what happened. Donna in English practically sent out a newsletter.”

  Instantly, my armpits go damp. Though I had an inkling that gossip about Hugh’s appearance on TV might be circulating around the English Department, I had not expected it to hit my neck of the woods so soon. If Donna knows, then everyone will.

  “What’s going on?” asks a male voice from the other side of the window.

  Brandon, our building’s handyman, is holding the air conditioner from his side.

  “She got engaged,” Alice says. “On television. Hugh Spencer asked her to marry him. Colleen Hirst, the dean’s secretary, TiVoed it.”

  That’s how hot Hugh is on campus. Women like Colleen actually TiVo his TV appearances.

  Brandon frowns at me in disappointment as though my engagement is a personal affront to his own credentials. “Thought you weren’t looking for a serious nonplatonic relationship.”

  Oh, dear. Is that what I told him?

  Years ago, shortly before I met Hugh, Brandon asked me— in a carefully worded and clearly rehearsed speech—if I would like to see the Boston Pops. This was particularly painful because he’d probably thought and thought about what I might consider a fancy date and he came up with the Pops. (Note to men: No woman under seventy likes the Pops.)

  Because he’d gone through such agony and because I knew turning him down would devastate him, I went with him to see the Pops and, prior to that, a way-too-expensive dinner at Pier 4, during which he kept rubbing his sweaty palms on his pants and talking about his ex-wife getting the kids and how that was so unfair.The worst was the awkward fumbling kiss in the car at the end. I cringe recalling his eager lips zeroing in on mine.

  Since then, we’ve never been truly at ease around each other. I rarely ask him for help with the copier or changing the fluorescent light fixture, unless I absolutely have to. And then, I never bring up our personal lives. I just assumed he knew Hugh and I were together. Guess not.

  “Alice doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” I bluff. “She’s smoking dope as usual.”

  “Not this early in the morning I’m not!”

  Gotta love Alice.

  “Look, Brandon,” she says, fed up.“Hugh and Genie have been dating for four years, as long as Trey Ray and I have. What would you expect? That he’d dump her?”

  Cough.

  “I’ll tell you what, if Trey doesn’t end up marrying me after all his shit I’ve put up with, that man will never walk straight again. Kick and twist. Learned it in self-defense.”

  Brandon winces and wobbles a bit with the air conditioner.

  “I’ve gotta go,” I say, before Alice kicks and twists me for details. “Bill’s swamping me with memos.”

  “He called, you know,” Alice says, as I turn the corner.

  “Bill?”

  “Hugh.”

  I freeze with my hand on the banister.Why would Hugh have called the office and not my home? Why didn’t he just leave a message on my machine?

  “How long ago?”

  “Ten minutes or so. Brandon was here, weren’t you?”

  As if that mattered. “Great. I’ll call back.” I do not ask if she mentioned our engagement because that’s not a question real brides-to-be would ask.

  I manage to climb all of two steps, my heart beating like I’m about to have a coronary, when Alice again shouts,“He wanted to know what the insanity was all about.”

  Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Deep breath. “Did he? That joker.”

  “I told him to leave a message on your machine. You might want to check.”

  I cannot dash to my office fast enough. An eternity passes as I fumble with the lock, open the door, and slam it behind me. Finally, I am safe in my small office with its one window and posters of Athens and Rome, places I’d planned to visit on my honeymoon. Or, like, whenever.

  Okay. I cannot panic. We are letting the chips fall where they may, right? I am Zen; problems are a tangent line touching me at one infinitesimal spot.

  Besides, what’s the worst that can happen? I will not lose my job over this. I mean, it’s a personal matter, not a professional one. Sure, the department is supersensitive about honesty after that Opal Mehta fiasco, which Connie claims will change admissions policies nationwide forever. But Connie ...

&
nbsp; Wait a second.Where is Connie?

  Connie’s office is across from mine and the door is closed, the light underneath off. It’s after nine and she’s not here.That’s funny because Connie’s always here. That’s what you do when your one aspiration in life is to become assistant director of admissions with the “big office” downstairs next to Bill Gladstone’s.

  And her car. I hadn’t noticed it when I came in.

  I rush to my one dinky window, which looks out onto the parking lot.

  Her parking spot, the one with the sign that reads CONNIE ROBESON, ADMISSIONS COUNSELOR, is empty. (The designated spot was a concession to Connie after she was passed over—again—for the assistant admissions director job that Kevin the Wunderkind now has.) Her leased Saab convertible is not there.

  Oh, happy day. Is it too much to dream that Connie the big-mouth busybody is not here to torture me with endless questions about my betrothal?

  I pick up my phone, ignore the blinking message light that no doubt is Hugh inquiring what all the insanity is about, and call down to Alice, who answers with her standard “Thoreau College Admissions. Alice speaking. How may I help you?” Even though she knows full well it is just me from room 201.

  “Is Connie here?”

  “Nooooo, she’s not, Genie.” Alice pauses and I hear Brandon crack a joke. His hanging around gives further credence to Connie’s theory that when Alice helps Brandon in the basement, the only fuse she’s flipping is his.“And I can say no more, especially ... to you.”

  To me? This is very strange. Of all the admissions counselors, I am Alice’s closest friend. Connie is a user who only sucks up to Alice when there’s a paper jam or when she needs a huge file photocopied right away.

  "Oh,” I say. "Sure. Just wanted to know if she’ll be back later today is all.”

  “Don’t you want to know where she is?”

  "No.That’s all right.” I fake a yawn.

  "She’s ...” Alice pauses again. “. . . out of the country.”