It does not care whether you are ready for it. It does not care if your hair looks good. It absolutely does not care if your life is an utter mess.
In November 2001, I, thoroughly intent on being a crazed, sad shut-in for the rest of my days, ran for the bus and crossed paths with the man who would spoil all my plans. In a move ripped from the pages of a terrible romantic comedy, he was standing up to give his seat to—I kid you not—a little old lady.
I should have known then that I was doomed.
We had dinner together a few weeks later, at a candlelit Italian restaurant that was so dangerously romantic I considered faking an illness in order to escape, but the only thing I could come up with was bubonic plague, and the heyday for that is sort of over. Besides, the appetizers had already arrived by then, so I tried to convince myself we’d just be better off as friends.
I’d concluded that was all I had room for in the maelstrom of my life—a friendship with a funny, sweet man whose eyes were the precise shade of brown usually found on frightened baby deer. I looked over at him across the table and silently promised not to kiss him. I kept this resolution for the better part of three hours.
In hindsight, I have to admire my restraint.
HERE’S THE THING: I’M NOT a believer in love at first sight. (There are a few caveats. If someone bears a striking resemblance to a young Harrison Ford or we’re talking about cake, all bets—along with my pants—are off.) I just don’t think that you can look at someone you barely know and promise, “I will, during some distant and particularly virulent bout of intestinal discomfort that has afflicted you, clean up the poop splatter that you unknowingly left on the underside of the toilet seat, all while withholding comment.” And let’s be honest with ourselves: there is no better litmus test for love than dealing with another human being’s bodily fluids and not (figuratively) rubbing it in their face afterward.
I’m pretty sure it’s in Corinthians.
Love is patient; love is kind. It does not envy; it does not boast; it does not make a big deal about who cleaned up whose shit.
With the exception of the tender sort of madness new parents feel for their children (most of which can be explained away by oxytocin and sleep deprivation), that sort of thing doesn’t develop overnight. It grows slowly, so that you don’t even realize what it is at first. You just know that at one point in time you were a functional, normal human being with a debilitating fear of coliform bacteria. And some time later you find yourself staring at a toilet brush and realizing that every love song and poem and sonnet that’s ever graced your ears suddenly makes sense.
Instead of striking like lightning, it grows slowly, under the most unlikely of circumstances and in the most terrible settings. Under buzzing florescent lights. While you are getting blisters from uncomfortable shoes and the rent is overdue. When someone is serenading you with Bryan Adams’s seminal ballad, “Summer of ’69” (a mating ritual that, much to your chagrin, was shockingly effective). That’s what’s incredible about love. It’s nothing like the movies. It happens to mere mortals, manifesting while they’re standing in line for groceries or getting a dental check-up or renewing their license at the DMV.
I’m lying about that last one. Love has never, ever thrived at the DMV. That place is where love goes to die. But I’m pretty sure those other examples are sound.
And dear god, it can be utter hell. It took me years to figure things out. First I had to yell, and cry, and break up with him on two occasions (for a total of three hours) before immediately reconciling. I may have, in a petrified move during the early days of our relationship, made out with some random guy with a tongue piercing and several misguided tattoos.
The problem wasn’t Rand. The problem was that—and my apologies to Huey Lewis and the News, but it must be said—I’d been completely misled about the power of love.
What we’ve been lied to about since we were small is that love can fix things when they are broken, instantly. That it can fix us. We are taught to believe that love is a transformative magic wand that turns pumpkins into coaches and dissolves belly fat and makes our teeth whiter. And all of this, supposedly, happens in an instant.
What we aren’t told is the truth: that love can actually complicate the fuck out of things. It doesn’t take away all the crap that existed before. It just adds a layer to it. If your life was messy before someone loved you, it will still be messy afterward. (It might even be worse, because now you need to wash the sex out of your sheets more often.) We aren’t told that it takes years to figure things out, and even then, you still might not.
It’s understandable to be petrified by that. To not want to have your understanding of the world completely turned on its head, to not want to have to do more laundry, to not want to navigate a relationship when you literally can’t even pay a mental health professional to commit to you.
So you start to put unreasonable expectations on that love as a means of getting away from it. You think because someone hasn’t instantly fixed your life that they are not the one you should be with. Sometimes, you will put them, and yourself, through hell just to prove that point.
But the real manner in which love works is much subtler. It does fix things. Or maybe, more accurately, it makes you fix things. You start to realize that if someone else loves you that much, maybe you should try to love yourself a bit more.
Admittedly, that sounds a little cheesy. And it’s in direct opposition to everything we learned from Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and the 1987 Kim Cattrall–Andrew McCarthy tour-de-force, Mannequin. Those stories taught us that love is what will save you. Love is literally what will make you human.
But why can’t you be the one that controls that? What if you start trying to become someone who’s worthy of the adoration of this weirdo who keeps telling you that you are wonderful and who won’t leave your bed. And after a while, you start thinking maybe they aren’t so weird. You learn about their favorite movie and what makes them angry and how their hair looks when they first wake up in the morning. You stop crying. You realize that they don’t need to fix the problems in your life, because you can fix it all your damn self.
You still worry about where things are headed, but you keep going anyway. You see where things go.
This was the effect that Rand’s affections had on me: slowly, I started to become a better person. I tried to be as good to him as he was to me. I found myself competing with him to see who could be the better partner. (He always won, but I had my moments. Like Valentine’s Day 2005, when he came home to me dancing naked to that CD he had wanted. It was the sort of unabashed, absurd display of adoration that can only happen when you are twenty-four, not entirely sure what the hell you are doing, and madly in love.) It was utterly obnoxious to those forced to witness it (the love, I mean. Not the dancing. I’m pretty sure only Rand saw that). My friends said that they were going to be sick, and I graciously handed out vomit bags.
The problem is, most love stories don’t focus on slow-simmering, shaky romance that takes its time to come to a rolling boil, even though that’s what most of us experience (and that’s if we’re lucky). It’s just not all that interesting. If Jane Austen were alive today, she’d be forced to have Mr. Darcy and Lizzie get together in the first twenty-five pages (also, Darcy would be into sadomasochism).
They would never fight about finances or take things the wrong way or get cold feet.
There is no place for those of us who are afraid or unsure, who wade slowly into the water and occasionally get freaked out by an oncoming wave, running off to make out with pierced strangers whose names we never bothered learning. (Oh, my god. Wait. I think it was Nathan. One of them was definitely a Nathan. And maybe there was a Jeff in there, too, somewhere.) But I’d argue that those of us who take our time—who scrutinize and deliberate and wonder if this is the right choice because life is really short when you think about it—never question our decisions. When you’ve already hashed out every neurotic do
ubt, the only thing left is utter conviction that there is no one else in the world with whom you’d rather spend your days.
I should back up here and tell you why Rand is so wonderful. I’ve written pages about it already—on my blog, in a tattered journal at the bottom of my bookcase left over from my college years—but the real sign of my love is this: I know every annoying thing about him, and I still adore him. There are no skeletons in the closet. We pulled them all out and put them on the couch, and they are a great conversation piece.
I would like to go over some of his more annoying habits now, much as I did in our wedding vows.
• He gets really cranky when he’s hungry but refuses to acknowledge that said crankiness is a result of hunger.
• He knows that I like to board a plane as soon as our row is called (ostensibly because I want to have room in the overhead compartment to store my bag, but I think primarily because of hazy childhood memories of being picked last during kickball). Consequently, he waits until just that moment to vanish. After I’ve dissolved into a panic, he will reappear eating a fro-yo and ask me what is wrong.
• He becomes an insufferable whiner whenever the weather climbs above 75 degrees.
• The night before a trip, after I’ve spent the week doing all of our laundry, Rand will ask me if I’ve washed a particular article of clothing. “If it was in the hamper, it’s washed!” I will tell him gleefully, still dizzy from Woolite fumes. Inevitably, said article of clothing will not be in the hamper. It will be hanging in the closet or tucked away in a drawer, completely indistinguishable from the clean clothes therein, and I am somehow supposed to know that it’s dirty.
• He eats Raisinets, arguably the worst candy ever made.
But here’s the thing: I knew this going in. By the time Rand proposed, I was acutely aware of every flaw and shortcoming and knew that I could live with all of them. I knew what delighted him (underbaked cookies, the work of Mel Brooks, the time that I was talking in my sleep and insisted I worked for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and what he hated (overcooked pasta, name-dropping, and phone calls that could have easily been handled over email).
I knew he was a generous tipper and an ardent feminist, that he was terrible at putting dirty clothes in the hamper, that he almost always smelled wonderful, but not in an overpowering way. I knew that he loved Marc Chagall and dark chocolate and me.
I knew that I could clean the toilet we shared and not make a big deal about it. I could do that for the rest of my life.
By the time he proposed, I knew exactly what I was getting into.
We were married in Ashland, Oregon. As with my husband, I took my time falling in love with the small town that sits near the Oregon-California border. When I first saw it, I didn’t even know where I was. Now I wonder why I spend time anywhere else.
That’s the thing about favorite people and favorite places—at one point in your life, they are all uncharted territory. There’s no alchemy that transforms them into the loves of your life. Usually, you just need time to figure it out. They earn your love. And if you are very, very lucky, you might earn theirs.
It was the summer of 2003, a couple of years into our relationship. I’d just graduated from college into the worst job market in decades and Rand, a recent college dropout who was swimming in debt, was about to turn twenty-four, so we decided to celebrate by taking a road trip. We were broke but figured we could break routine and fight in a cramped KIA Spectra, as opposed to our cramped one-bedroom apartment, and the change of pace would be good for us. (The early years of our relationship were tumultuous. He was plagued by creditors, and I was plagued by self-doubt.)
On one scorching July afternoon during that tempestuous trip, Rand and I were driving through the hills of southern Oregon. I can’t remember where we were heading or where we’d come from—those details have been sacrificed to time. I only know that we were lost, and when we first saw the little town, nestled in a valley and surrounded by hills turned golden in the dry heat of summer, we breathed a sigh of relief (I’d seen enough horror movie trailers to know that bad things happened to young couples who got lost on road trips).
Rand took a photo of me that day. I am standing by the side of a dusty road, dressed in a skirt and tank top but inexplicably wearing shearling boots. (The early 2000s were a crazy time. Everyone was piercing their eyebrows and tattooing Chinese characters on their bodies. I am grateful I escaped with just one seasonably inappropriate pair of shoes.) The hills loom behind me like waves of burnished brass, and I am smiling at the man behind the camera, entirely unaware that one day he and I would get married here.
But that’s how it goes. These things take time. You start weaving a story together and you wake up one day to find that it comprises huge sections of your life. That without that person, something would be missing.
We had lunch outside on a quiet patio, and I forbade Rand from asking the server where we were because it made us look suspicious.
“Only criminals have lunch in random towns that they didn’t plan on being in,” I explained. He just stared at me quietly for a while. He does that a lot.
The stillness would be broken by a sea of gray-haired retirees that emerged from one of the buildings. Rand and I stared at one another, dumbfounded, trying to figure the reason behind the huge congregation of old people flooding the streets. Was it a meeting of the local chapter of the Werther’s Original Fan Club? A Sam Waterston lookalike contest that was admirably gender agnostic? A midterm election? Stumped, we finally asked our server what was going on.
“The plays just got out,” she explained.
And then it clicked. In the Pacific Northwest, Ashland is whispered like an incantation among those of us who secretly looked forward to English class in high school, who spent too much time engrossed in sonnets, who were destined to keep our virginities until our twenties because we knew any romance we’d experience would pale next to that of Benedick and Beatrice’s (and maybe also because no one would sleep with us). I’d heard of this place plenty of times but had never seen it.
The story is that in the early 1930s, Angus Bowmer, a fellow Washingtonian, University of Washington alum, and quintessential theater nerd, headed down to Ashland to take a job at the nearby university. In 1935, he managed to persuade the town leaders to hold a Shakespeare Festival, complete with an outdoor theater. It would become an annual occurrence, growing into the internationally renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Bowmer died in 1979. During his time at OSF, he produced Shakespeare’s entire canon, directed thirty productions, and performed thirty-two roles. In 1970, the OSF opened up a six-hundred-seat theater named in his honor. When asked if he could have dreamed that his creation would have grown to this size, his reply was brief.
“All my dreams are open-ended.”
In the years since Bowmer started the OSF, the company has been written up in countless national newspapers and received glowing praise from The New York Times for its commitment to diversity in casting and focus on the works of emerging playwrights, particularly women and people of color. In what may be the most bourgeoisie compliment I have ever given, the performances in Ashland eclipse virtually everything I’ve seen in New York or London. I realized that the size of a town doesn’t matter—it’s what takes place there that’s important.
When a tiny hamlet in rural Oregon reinvents itself as a tourist destination for thespian enlightenment, when you see Pericles going for an evening run or Ophelia walking down the street looking remarkably lovely and undrowned, anything becomes possible.
On our second trip to Ashland, Rand and I saw our first play at the OSF, a production of As You Like It. On our third visit, after too much wine and not enough crème brûlée, we decided this was where we wanted to get married. On our fourth visit, not long after I returned from my trip to Italy with Kati, we did.
ON OUR WEDDING DAY, OUR rental car’s thermostat read 104 degrees. My dress was crinkled taffeta, and Rand wore a
tuxedo with a tag inside that read “Made Expressly for Geraldine’s Husband.” My family complained about the remote location of our wedding and the heat, and we nodded sympathetically and directed them to the open bar.
They didn’t understand why we’d decided to get married down there, and we didn’t need them to. That’s the great thing about being in love. You don’t need to justify it or explain it to anyone. You just need to enjoy it and occasionally be reminded to put on pants.
At the reception, my brother Edward raised his glass and gave one of the best wedding speeches ever composed. I had given him a list of topics that were off-limits. He began by reading it aloud, because that is what my brother does. He says precisely what you don’t want him to, and every word of it will be painful and brilliant.
He concluded with this:
“Rand,” he said, looking at his new brother-in-law, “you’re family now. And that means nobody hurts you… but us.”
My family, having completely forgotten about the heat and their own discomfort thanks to the amnesiac properties of a chilled rosé, cheered so loudly our champagne glasses rattled, while my new in-laws smiled nervously and clutched their purses.
There, in the middle of those same hills I saw on our first visit, as the sun set and we stood in a field of gold, Rand told me he loved me. As a reply, I pretended to throw up a bit. I also noted that I had taken off my underwear two hours prior because it was too hot and expressed excitement that no one would be able to tell. He just laughed. Like me, he knew exactly whom he was marrying, exactly what he was getting into.
We’ve returned to Ashland every year for our anniversary. On our fifth visit, I realized that if the air is just right, the entire town smells like lavender. On our ninth visit, my husband revealed that he could touch his tongue to his nose, information which, as his wife, I feel I should have been privy to much, much sooner. On our tenth visit, we found that smoke from wildfires nearby makes the moon look red.
All Over the Place Page 3