by Jerramy Fine
Finally, after days of ranting and raving on the state of global immigration, I decided to grab a hold of myself and do something rational. I decided to seek legal advice. So I made an appointment with one of the best immigration law firms in the city, marched into their distinguished offices, and explained my dilemma.
The instant I met my white-haired solicitor and saw the weary look in his eye, I knew he had counseled one hysterical American too many.
He sighed loudly and said, “Miss Fine, as you are an American citizen with no known links to the Commonwealth or to the EU, you have three possible options if you wish to become legally employed in the U.K.”
Three options! See? Things were looking up!
“Miss Fine, were any of your grandparents born in Ireland, Scotland, or England?”
I was about to mention how it was highly likely that I was switched at birth and wasn’t entirely sure about the answer to that question, but I decided against it.
“No,” I squeaked. “My grandparents were second and third generation American.”
“Well, Miss Fine, that’s unfortunate. Otherwise you would have been granted an ancestral visa.”
I sat there thinking of all the young people I knew who had Irish or Scottish grandparents. Most of them did nothing all day long but sit around and watch MTV. Most of them probably couldn’t even find London on a map. And there I was being told that they were allowed to work in the U.K? Was there any justice?
I tried to stay calm. “Well, what’s my second option?”
“Your second option, Miss Fine, is to become a missionary.”
“A missionary? Like a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness?”
“That is correct. Do you see yourself partaking in full-time missionary work before your visa expires?”
Was he really asking me this question?
“Um, no,” I answered. “I’m pretty sure that’s not a possibility.”
“Then, Miss Fine, that brings us to our final option.”
Please, please, please let option three be the one. I looked at him expectantly. “Go on,” I said.
“Miss Fine, do you have a boyfriend here in England? Or maybe a fiancé?”
For godsake, must we talk about the tragedy of my love life right now?
“Well…at the moment I don’t. But believe me, it’s not for lack of trying!” I laughed. But the solicitor didn’t laugh with me.
“Well, Miss Fine, I suggest you try harder, because unless you find yourself a British husband in the next three weeks, I’m afraid you have exhausted your options.”
And with that, he handed me a bill for 190 pounds.
I began to panic. I began to wonder if I should become a Mormon. I was still going to interviews, but now that I was being upfront about my work permit situation I was having zero luck. I was running out of strength and according to the date stamped onto my passport, I was running out of time. I had thirty days until deportation.
It wasn’t until the end of my last term at LSE that I actually met a real-live English person that actually lived in London. Two things shocked me about this meeting: a) Max introduced us; and b) the meeting took place in a dingy LSE pub filled with rowdy Americans. Nevertheless, this was indeed a genuine English specimen.
His name was Adam, and although he wasn’t an aristocrat, he was insanely charming (not to mention quite good-looking). His contagious humor and biting wit made him the center of every party and people positively flocked to him. I certainly was no exception. It had taken me nearly a year to find someone like Adam in London, and now that I had, I wasn’t about to let a jewel like him go. So whenever I couldn’t make it out to Oxford, I would do my very best to spend the weekends at his side.
Late one evening, Adam and I were drinking the night away in a trendy Covent Garden nightclub, when he mysteriously pulled me away from his entourage and into a more secluded corner of the bar.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
Adam was so adorable—tall and blond with big blue eyes. For an English guy, he was unusually loud, but he was so charismatic and lovable it was maddening. LSE was filled with arrogant students who thought they were going to rule the world one day, but Adam’s intelligence was eons above them. When Adam and I first met and he told me that he planned to be prime minister, I didn’t doubt him for a second. It was so refreshing to meet someone else who had fully surrendered to the power of their passion (political or otherwise) and the two of us had clicked instantly. And as I looked up at him that Friday night in the dark corner of bar, I wondered for the millionth time why there was no spark between us.
“Jerramy, I’m sure you have probably guessed by now, but I’m gay.”
Oh. That’s why.
“Adam! Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Well, telling everyone is probably not the best idea for my political career right now.” He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening. “However, what would be good for my image right now is a girlfriend—and not just any girlfriend. An up-and-coming politician of my caliber could have nothing less than a blond Jackie O like you on his arm!”
“Adam!” I laughed. “What are you talking about? Do you want me to pretend to be your girlfriend?”
“No, Jerramy. I want you to be my wife.”
I stared at him. Maybe I had misheard him with all the blaring techno music. “What did you say?”
“I said I want you to be my wife. I know you are having a work permit crisis, but if we get married, you would be allowed to stay in the U.K. Not to mention you would be great for my image! We both win. Think about it.” And with that, he pulled me onto the dance floor.
Like a certifiable mental patient, I actually started to consider Adam’s ludicrous proposal. After all, aside from the royal part, Adam was pretty much everything I was looking for. He was cute, he was English, he was smart, he was funny, not to mention he would probably be prime minister in my lifetime. Not to mention that I would love to be a political wife. If he were straight, I actually might have stopped holding out for Peter Phillips and married Adam the very next day.
But are perfect men with such a perfect set of perfect qualities ever straight? Of course not. And do they ever stop befriending me? Don’t be silly.
My mom tells me this is because I am intelligent and glamorous and that gay guys are drawn to these qualities. This makes me wonder exactly which qualities of mine straight guys are drawn to, but I have learned to take this explanation as a compliment. Besides, wasn’t Princess Diana forever on the arm of Elton John and Gianni Versace?
Still, try tossing around the pros and cons of marrying a gay guy over a few glasses of white wine and see how insane your world becomes.
We’d have to be married for four years. After the divorce, I’d have instant U.K. resident status and could live and work anywhere in the country. Simple. Easy. Painless. Pass the Sauvignon Blanc.
I just couldn’t believe I was at a point in my life where I had to make such a ridiculous decision. This had never once entered into my carefully calculated live-in-England-and-meet-English-royalty-and-live-happily-ever-after-plan.
I decided I had better seek nonlegal advice on this one and I began with girls.
Before I even broached the subject with my wacky friend Amy, I knew what she was going to say. Talking to Amy is like listening to a professional motivational speaker. She can take any set of circumstances, no matter how hopeless or absurd, and make you think that it is the ideal situation.
“Marry him!” she said.
“Really?” I asked.
“No question,” she said confidently. “When you finally meet the man of your dreams, he will love you so much that he won’t care about you and Adam.”
“You mean when I meet Peter Phillips the fact that I am a twenty-seven-year-old American divorcée who married a homosexual to stay in England will be totally irrelevant?”
“Totally irrelevant,” she insisted.
I understood what she was s
aying, but somehow I didn’t think the phrase “love conquers all” was created with the above scenario in mind. But still, maybe I was just being old-fashioned.
All the girls I talked to had similar modern idealism. So, I sought opinions on the matter from guys. Who, of course, advised me to do exactly the opposite.
“Don’t do it,” Mike said firmly when I called him up.
“But why?” I whimpered. “Isn’t it true that when I finally meet the man of my dreams, he will love me so much that he won’t care about me and Adam?”
“Jerramy, no man will ever trust a woman who has married for convenience, no matter how much he loves her.”
The more wine I drank and the more advice I received about my potential gay marriage, the more I didn’t know which way was up.
I found myself at a sappy American dinner party and the beautiful, young, ultra-Christian hostess said to me in a chirpy voice, “Jerramy, if you don’t believe that marriage is a contract between you, your spouse, and God, go ahead and marry Adam.” It occurred to me that maybe I should have gone to her for advice on missionary work instead.
Meanwhile, the parental advice was equally as baffling. My dad was barely ruffled by the idea. “Jerramy, just marry the kid if you need to.” I think he found it faintly amusing that his daughter could be married to England’s first gay prime minister.
My mother was just as useless: “Jerramy,” she said, “I want you to think really hard before you marry this gay guy.” Thanks, Mom. But I will also try to think really hard before I marry a straight guy.
In the end, I didn’t accept Adam’s kind proposal. Prime minister or not, gay or not, marriage is about true love. And I knew my handsome, charming, English, royal, straight husband named Peter was out there waiting for me, and deep down I knew he would appreciate such a decision.
I won’t bore you with the painful details, but eventually the gods intervened (as they always do) and a London company hired me and gave me a work permit before I succumbed to the lure of gay marriage. It was rather predictable, really. Like most intelligent but innumerate blondes in London, I ended up in publishing.
They say that when it comes to your career, you should always do what you love and never, ever do it for the money. Well, I’ll tell you right now I wasn’t doing it for the money. (I think I actually had a better standard of living as a student.) In fact the minute I accepted the position, several city-dwelling relatives accused me of wasting my expensive education and selling myself short. But I didn’t care. Being in England made my heart soar, and in that way, I was genuinely doing it for love.
I think the problem with a lot of people out there is that they tend to confuse their career with their calling, their earning power with their success, and where they work with where they belong—and there was no way I was going to fall into that real-world trap. Besides, I tended to be extremely traditional when it came to such things and I had a strong feeling that—regardless of my future salary level or corporate rank—meeting my true love, being his perfect royal wife, and experiencing the miracle of giving birth to our royal children were probably going to be slightly more rewarding than sending faxes, faffing with press releases, and delivering quarterly reports.
Thankfully, weekends in Oxford helped keep everything in perspective. I quickly realized that enthusiasm of any kind about one’s job was terribly un-English. As you might have guessed, one’s career is not nearly as important as one’s family background, where one lives, where one went to boarding school, and the people at the party one knows.
Sixteen
“My greatest happiness is to serve my gracious King and Country.”
—HORATIO NELSON
“Expectation is the root of all heartache.”
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
When I was in ninth grade, a new family moved down the road from us and as ever, I was recommended to them as a good local babysitter. I went to visit the mother, Madeline, for my “babysitter interview” and I was delighted to see that this grown woman seemed to be as obsessed with Disney princesses as I was!
Disney figurines made of porcelain filled the shelves in her house—and I found out later that she even had figurines of Cinderella and Prince Charming on her wedding cake! Not to mention that I’d been there less than ten minutes when her four-year-old son told me that I looked like Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. Now, this was a family after my own heart!
Not only that, Madeline was a successful romance novelist—unheard of in our small town! (And unbelievably impressive and exotic to me at the time.) Madeline and I talked for hours that afternoon, and sensing that she might understand, I decided to tell her about my letter to Peter and the devastating response I had received from Buckingham Palace.
I was right. She did understand. And in her southern accent, she told me it was the most romantic thing she had ever heard in her whole life. She quickly ran into her bedroom and brought out a copy of W magazine. I had never seen W magazine before and was amazed that an American society magazine even existed, much less was delivered monthly to a house in my cowpoke town!
Inside Madeline’s W was an enormous full-color, double-page spread on Peter Phillips, which she promptly tore out and handed to me. As I began to scan the article, she took off her rhinestone-rimmed glasses and looked at me very seriously.
“Darlin,’” she drawled, “Of course this boy didn’t write you back straight away! That’s not how fairytales work!”
“It isn’t?” I whimpered.
“Of course not! Where’s the fun if you find your prince so easily? That isn’t a story! There has to be drama! There has to be heartache! You’re too young to live happily ever after so soon! Give it time, darlin.’”
Although I was never quite sure if Madeline was able to separate me from any of the fictional characters in her novels, her words never left me. And lately I seemed to be following her literary instructions to the letter. Drama and heartache? Boy, would she be proud. I was becoming a certified expert in both.
I had fantasized about leaving the bomb shelter since the first day I walked through its doors, so once all the paperwork for my new job was secure, I embarked on a widespread search for the perfect English flatshare66 in which my nearly perfect English life could officially begin.
Adam wanted to live in a giant house in a terrible London neighborhood (it was “edgy,” he insisted) with five other closeted gay guys, and although I was invited to join them, I kindly declined. Everyone at Oxford still had one more year to go before they graduated and I obviously couldn’t afford to live by myself. So basically, when it came to London accommodation, my only choice was to find myself a flatmate.
My plan was to go over every “flatmate wanted” ad with a fine-toothed comb until I found an English girl to live with who was as well versed in Debrett’s as I was; someone who was equally as silly, romantic, and bold; and someone who would be my partner-in-crime as I continued to scour the U.K. for my destiny. But shopping for the perfect flatmate is not like shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. You actually have to live with the person. One minute you’re introducing yourselves and the next minute you’re sharing a bathroom every morning. When you think about it, it’s very weird. Still, I’d lived with perfect strangers in college and they turned out to be my best friends, so I knew there was at least a chance that moving in with a complete stranger wouldn’t be a total disaster.
I can’t even tell you how many flats I looked at during that time. I would get up at 6 A.M., buy the paper, circle all the promising ads, and call them up before breakfast. For a nocturnal person like me it was not at all enjoyable, but it was absolutely necessary because most of the flats were taken, usually sight unseen, before 6:15 A.M. Clearly I wasn’t the only person in the city desperate to live with strangers.
As I’ve mentioned before, I firmly believed that living with non-English people defeated the purpose of living in England in the first place—so I wouldn’t even go to the flat viewing if the person on t
he other end of the phone didn’t speak with an English accent. This meant I had to make about fifteen to twenty phone calls for every one viewing appointment, but I knew it would be worth it in the long run.
I scheduled about four or five appointments per day, and spent weeks trekking around the city, knocking on doors, and wondering if the flat inside would become my new home. But usually I was so appalled by the level of squalor I encountered, and the nerve these people had to charge for it, that I didn’t even bother to determine their knowledge of Debrett’s. After two days of this, it became depressingly clear that I would have to double the amount I was willing to pay for rent if I wanted anything close to first-world living conditions.
With my new, completely irrational bud get, things improved and the building I finally chose to reside in was located in St. John’s Wood—one of the smartest neighborhoods in London! It was just minutes away from the infamous Abbey Road, was a short tube ride to work, had a friendly concierge, and the lobby was impeccably clean. Yet as I rang the bell to meet the flat’s occupant, I still braced myself for the worst.
When the door finally opened I was shocked to see someone standing there who looked relatively normal—presentable even.
“My name is Rebecca,” she smiled, gesturing me inside. Dainty and dark-haired, she was quite pretty, well dressed (in a Laura Ashley sort of way), and her accent wasn’t bad either.
“I’m twenty-seven years old,” she continued, “and I’m a manager at [a major investment bank]. I work very long hours and am hardly ever home, so if you moved in you’d have the place to yourself most of the time.”
I told her a little about myself. I didn’t mention anything about royalty, of course, but I did mention my quest for the perfect English guy.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve recently broken up with my boy-friend, but I’m almost ready to get back on the London dating circuit myself. Perhaps the two of us could go out together occasionally.”