In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  THREE

  SAY YES:

  LOVE AND MARRIAGE

  I met Cal in the summer of 1991 at our first job after college, fact checkers for the now defunct PC Magazine. How I hated that job! I had a crushing chip on my shoulder: I couldn’t believe that I had worked so hard to end up at a goddamned computer magazine with a bunch of loser computer people. I had done everything right! I had networked with and sent my résumé to editors at the major news, literary, and lifestyle magazines in New York (though with the first Bush recession in full swing, hiring freezes were entrenched). I had nurtured an ongoing correspondence with the then editor of The New Yorker, Bob Gottlieb, who showed me inexplicable kindness by responding to my fulsome notes on his manual typewriter and did his best to connect me with an entry-level editorial position, which was ultimately stymied by his ouster and the subsequent installation of the editorial impresario Tina Brown. In the end, the only job that offered to pay me a living wage, along with health insurance, was PC Magazine (the magazines for which I wanted to work—Harper’s, The New York Review of Books—did not, which made working there a possibility only for smart kids bankrolled by their parents). So there I was, sullen and contemptuous, but also taking my career extremely seriously and studying office politics intently. I was like that self-absorbed, self-loathing, ineffectual, plotting guy in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground.

  Cal, however, did not give a crap about any of that. He made this plain at our first introduction, in which he leaned back in his cubicle’s office chair, drummed carelessly on his desk with a pencil, and allowed as how he had not only never networked with editors but didn’t even really care, or know that much, about journalism. He had majored in religion and philosophy and was a hard-drinking member of the fraternity Beta Theta Pi. Having no clear idea of what he’d actually like to do for a career, he’d simply stuffed copies of his résumé into a few dozen envelopes addressed to “Human Resources” at various newspapers and magazines, gone on a handful of interviews, and taken the job at PC Magazine based on a vague sense that computers were “going to be important.” He’d stay at the job, he said, until he got bored. “I told them that in my interview,” he said. I was first dumbfounded, then seriously irritated. Arrogant, not funny, not smart, frat guy, I noted. He’ll be fired before summer is out.

  But, of course, I was wrong—as I daresay I have been about most important things in my life. In the first week of work, he appeared at the opening to my cubicle, panicked, to ask if I had any Windex. He needed it, he said, to disinfect a floppy disk that he suspected had a virus. I stared at him. I would come to recognize the look he had on his face then as his comic signature: a frozen deer-in-the-headlights expression, with an undercurrent of self-mockery. As I sat chomping on a giant liverwurst sandwich (which, he would later tell me, made him fall head over heels then and there), I mused: This guy is kinda pretty funny.

  He also turned out to be an extremely quick study. Actually, he was flat-out smart. None of the fact checkers, including me, really knew anything about computers. As it turned out, most of us had been hired straight out of snooty liberal arts colleges because the management had decided that year to raise the editorial profile of PC Magazine by grooming fancy writers and editors rather than hiring techies for whom writing and editing was, essentially, irritating and trivial. Most of the twentysomethings in the fact-checking pool were English majors laboring to grasp even basic computerese, but within a few weeks of working there, Cal was using pliers to wrench chips off motherboards, tweaking macros, plugging in Ethernet networks. He had figured out exactly what was going on.

  And he had a lot more going on besides that. I noted the dog-eared copy of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or on his desk. I noted his good ties, unpleated khakis, chunky-knit sweaters. I noted that he was not just smart, but also a really good kind of weird. The turning point came when some computer company sent him a Rubik’s Cube as PR swag along with a press kit, and I watched him solve it in under three minutes. When I expressed open admiration, he took off his shoes and socks and solved the thing with his prehensile toes. To me, it was like God speaking through the bush.

  He also had a life, a fun life, which I did not. His social life was comprised of nightly bar gatherings of his fellow graduating class of fraternity brothers who had moved together en masse to the city that summer. He would come in to work bleary-eyed, but obviously content and well-adjusted: a normal recent college graduate. As an acid, chain-smoking malcontent with a past, I was obliged to deride him about that, which he accepted with good humor—and would later tell me that he had been “intrigued” by what he supposed was the secret, fascinating life that I was deliberately keeping private at work. (Again: It never fails to amaze how one’s neuroses can, when masked, seem like something completely different to the outside world.) The truth was that I was isolated and miserable, living in a small apartment in a charmless netherworld wedged between the Upper East Side and Harlem with my extremely depressed roommate. Most nights, I came home from work, holed up in my room, drank beer, and worked on short stories on my computer before passing out asleep on the petrified cotton strata embedded in my futon. It sucked. Did I mention Dostoyevsky?

  Also, in spite of my perverse defensiveness, I admired Cal. Such confidence! Such was his breezy dignity and likeability that everyone instinctively conferred a virtually uncontested authority on him. I first observed it a few months after we met at work. As mentioned, when Cal and I were hired fresh out of college in 1991, PC Magazine was in the process of revamping its staff and structure from ragtag to professionally polished, and one of the executive moves was to hire a big gun from Newsweek to manage the crew of editorial assistants. The big gun, who was hired that winter, was going to train us to be real researcher-reporters. She immediately instituted a number of annoying administrative changes, which involved attendance at daily progress meetings; files marked up and stapled together according to regulation; interminable accountability procedures that were impossible to follow and still get your actual work done. The changes stank, but the big gun herself also kind of stank. In retrospect, it’s clear that she was put in a hostile situation that would have made anyone crabby. But her lording over us that this is how real reporters did it at Newsweek only reminded us that we were neither real reporters nor employees of Newsweek, so the whole situation quickly became bad and contentious. Everyone groused about it during and after work and found passive-aggressive ways to undermine the whole operation—everyone, that is, except Cal.

  He simply, coolly refused. The big gun would appear at his cubicle and ask him why he wasn’t at the daily progress meeting. He would reply calmly, “I can’t go to that meeting—I have too much work to do.” Pretty soon, it became just so. Convinced by this argument, the editor for whom he directly worked gave him special dispensation. Just like that, he became the only researcher-reporter who didn’t have to attend the meetings. In fact, he didn’t have to do anything except exactly what he wanted to do, and no one was exactly sure what that was, though he obviously was working. Cal had pulled off the ultimate Jedi mind trick. He was Obi-Wan Kenobi. He was Bartleby the Scrivener. He was the main guy in Office Space. He was my hero.

  As evidenced at work, Cal’s centrifugal force had a wide reach, but its nexus was at the center of his vast social circle. This is how it worked: He would begin taking calls every Friday, midmorning. The question was: “Where are we going tonight?” The answer was: wherever he wanted to go. This was not only because that was the place to go, but because that was where he would be. Every so often, there would be a defector who wanted to make some other suggestion, like a disgruntled populist. Cal would neither accede nor contest. He’d just say, “That’s cool. Have a good time, man.” Click. Occasionally, the defector might then decide to rally a coup, seizing the opportunity to lodge his resentment of Cal’s benevolent despotism. There might be a sympathetic groundswell for a bit, but such was Cal’s pull that it was just a matter of time before the kids came
home to Daddy. The rebellion would fizzle out within a few hours, announced by the calls that would begin coming in a little after lunch: “Fuck Tenth Street Lounge, man. Where’re we going?” I would not be surprised to learn that the East Village bar-club Brownies owed an impressive fraction of its popularity in the 1990s to Cal’s influence.

  But it wasn’t his popularity that made such a big impression on me. For one thing, I like most people—I love a big handful of them—and by and large, the feelings have always seemed to be reciprocal. For another, being popular in your teens and early twenties is what it is for that period of time. I’m not sure that it says, in itself, a great deal about anything particularly durable in a person—and I am, as mentioned, someone for whom the secret of durable pigments means an inordinate amount. Rather, it was the quality of his friends’ devotion that was so moving to me. This bespoke some important quality in him. I wasn’t sure what that might be, but it seemed very good.

  So in that mise-en-scène of early-twenties coolness, when he coolly began asking me to join him in hanging out with his friends after work, I coolly began considering it. In my timorous little heart, I was psyched. But of course I was also leery. First of all, there was the question of the friends. Historically, fraternity people and I are a bad fusion. The whole idea of a fraternity to me is dorky-ass at best, genuinely dangerous at worst. There was a better than excellent chance that I’d lose it at one or more of his friends, and that by morning I’d be crowned as “that uptight chick at your office.” The other thing, of course, was that he was more than likely considering such invitations to be preliminary dates. Suffice it to say, there was no way I could do this. So I didn’t go.

  Cal was undeterred. He just said things like “You grabbing lunch? Hold on a sec—I’m starving.” In fairly short order, he was accompanying me to Curry in a Hurry every day. He signed up for the corporate sponsored stop-smoking program that I had joined so that we could become stop-smoking “buddies.” To help test our resolve, we were supposed to have meals together and rate the relative “tastiness” of after-eating cigarettes; soon, we were going out for dinner after work a few times a week. When that got pricey, he offered to make dinner for me at my apartment because I was a kitchen idiot. We went to art-house movies at the Film Forum and Angelika. After a while, I felt okay enough to get together with the fraternity friends, and they were not assholes. They were actually a whole crew of Harold and Kumar, and they would end up becoming close friends over the next sixteen years. I began saying things like “I’m not your girlfriend,” and he would respond “What are you talking about?” Ultimately, we were hanging out together virtually every day and night. He would later confess that he hated Indian food and loved action-adventure blockbusters and that he had never had any intention of stopping smoking. But I had figured that out already. In truth, I had sniffed him out pretty much after the Windex incident. After that, I’d just been watching.

  We finally got together at the office Christmas party. While our fellow fact checkers were either spazzing at the office party shuffle or throwing up behind the open bar, we drank way too many pints of Bass and sat at a table with a yellow rose on it. He gave it to me; I rolled my eyes. We left the party in a cab and never left each other’s side for the next sixteen years. I kept the yellow rose for ten years, until it crumbled to dust.

  What did we do in the early love period? We mooned over each other in cafés in the West Village. Say all you want about that backdrop—I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now. We clearly observed the clichéd stage set of our budding romance. We giggled about it. Look—here we are, huddled together under the awning of a French pastry shop on Bleeker as rain gushes onto the cobblestone street! Look—red carnations in the vase atop the red-and-white-checked tablecloth at our Italian restaurant! Look—we can’t read the Sunday Times and our lattes have gotten tepid because we’re too absorbed in the semiotics of each other’s every facial expression! So what? It was lovely and beautiful, and I have never felt more swaddled in happiness and ease. I even remember reading Bonfire of the Vanities at the time: Sherman McCoy recalling the early days with the woman who would become his wife, living in the squalor of their West Village studio, happy and hopeful in spite of their relative poverty. And I remember thinking: Yuppie scum—only a matter of time before that guy becomes a bond trader. To be young and in love in New York is clichéd if you have illusions about yourself, the world: that things will change. We had no illusions. No one was going to be rich. We didn’t like our jobs. He was a good person masquerading as a frat guy–partier; I knew it. I was a genuine freak masquerading as a poser; he knew it. That was immutable. We were giddy and hopeful anyway.

  We were giddy and hopeful in spite of the odd truth that we didn’t have much in common. Although I mostly got over it, after I came to really like the actual guys themselves, his fraternity affiliation remained a bee in my bonnet, albeit a bee that buzzed more lethargically over time. His love of Anne Rice, even of Kierkegaard, came close to being deal-breakers in the very early stages. Interview with the Vampire and Diary of a Seducer struck me as frothy, grandiose, reductive—teenage Goth. There were other things. I do not like most action-adventure movies. I do like adventures on the spur of the moment. I do not think Winona Ryder is a good actor, though I do think she is beautiful. I do think Chris Farley was one of the funniest people who ever lived, though I do not think that it had anything to do with his weight. I love John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Raymond Carver, and Douglas Coupland. I hate cats, bands whose lead female singers have girlish voices, black furniture, and blue jokes. I am afraid of bills, parking tickets, and pretty much anything involving mail and money. I am not afraid of speaking up or of working super, extra hard to get a job that I love. I am an unconscionable slob. He was the exact opposite in every regard, except with the blue humor. But none of that really mattered. Discovering his lack of interest in, or downright aversion to, the things I liked actually made me feel valued and safe. He had done these things to be near me, with me: not the résumé me, the snarky, fashiony me, the wounded animal me. Me. I felt happy, calm, protected. I would be freaking out about whatever issue of the day, and he would sit back, regard me as a painting, and have something marvelous and soothing and right to say that made everything make sense.

  I wasn’t the only one to whom he extended such consolation, though I may have been the most reliant on it and, because of that, the most grateful. His friends ran everything by him before making a move on virtually anything. They wanted to know: Should they go to graduate school? What kind of soap should they use—Lever 2000 or Dial? Where should they take someone on the second date—McSwiggen’s or ice skating at Rock Center? Where should they live—cheap Kip’s Bay, cheap East Village? Hair: gel or mousse? They even asked him for medical advice, though he cannot abide blood, sweat, or innards. They asked him for investment advice, though he has never picked a good stock. No woman ever became the official girlfriend of a friend without meeting Cal first. That his friends adored him certainly explains a great deal of this, but it was more than that, as I had surmised early on. People trusted Cal. His principles were so ingrained that he never thought to advertise them. They were just knitted into the bones.

  I had never known anyone like this; such traits seemed practically unaccountable. But the great cosmic ledger keeps track of every credit and debit, and the receipt for Cal’s solid soul and infallible ethics were from the same place: his upbringing.

  Cal loved his parents. Period. Early in our togetherness, I thought this was some kind of goody-goody bluff. On my home world, you had to say that you loved your parents, but you remained ambivalent, guarded, and critical. I learned quickly that Cal was a different animal. One time, I pouted dramatically about his having made a plan to have dinner with his parents one evening rather than eat with me, though he ate with me every night. He looked at me square-on and said that his parents had done everything for him, he loved them, and that if they wanted to
have dinner with him every week, he would be happy to do it. I was so moved that though I didn’t understand it, I never said anything about it again. But over the years, I was able to assemble the papyrus pieces of Cal’s Genesis story. It was like decoding extraterrestrial hieroglyphics.

  Cal came from family people. They were from the Philippines, and to the extent that it is fair or plausible to generalize, one can say of Filipino society that it is extraordinarily devoted to family—and for this reason, getting to know Cal’s was disorienting and provoking for a rogue entity like me. At first, I thought it was a question of size. While his nuclear family comprised just Cal, his younger sister, and his parents, such restrictive definitions were not observed in their worldview; anyone related to them was family. This is a tradition in a huge number of cultures, but even so, Cal’s family was downright galactic: twenty aunts and uncles, more than ninety first cousins, an extended circle of grands, great-grands, second and third cousins, their spouses, and so on. Except for a handful who’d stayed in the Philippines, they all lived on Staten Island, and they spent all their free time together. Family dinners, for example, were like nothing I’d ever seen.

  In my WASP experience, if you were invited to a family dinner, you expected to be offered a cocktail or two and submit to the parents’ tactful interview about your background, education, occupation, and interests, after which you would sit down to a pleasant conversation and the stock Protestant “guest” meal: poached salmon, asparagus, and if someone was feeling fancy, maybe risotto with a barely discernible amount of butter and salt. With Cal’s family, there might be four people present, there might be fifty. As soon as you walked in the door, you were kissed on the cheek with an audible smack, exhorted to “Eat first!” and tendered a Styrofoam plate groaning with pancit palabok, lumpia, lechon, tapa, and rice. After that, you were on your own. You sat wherever there was an open spot, eating, smiling, watching the children dash about and make impromptu performances for the adults, who laughed and clapped their hands and absently admonished the little girls to straighten their dresses and the little boys to “be nice!” After the card tables were set up, the mah-jongg sets and whiskey bottles came out, and as the night wore on, more relations would simply show up. At some point, an auntie would plunk herself down at the white baby grand and produce the most perfect, tinkling cocktail piano you’ve ever heard outside of an old-school hotel bar, and before long, a tipsy coterie would encircle her singing “You Light Up My Life,” “Memories,” and “Love Will Keep Us Together,” swaying in unison, eyes glossy with sentiment.