Ms. Taken Identity

by Dan Begley

  After dinner, the adults play a gift-stealing game. We’ve all brought a wrapped gift under ten bucks, gag or serious, and we throw all of them on the dining room table. Low number chooses the first gift and unwraps it, then each subsequent person opens a new gift or steals one already unwrapped, which gives the person who lost a gift a similar option, steal or unwrap. It’s a surprisingly lively game, and we ooh and ahh a lot, and haggle and barter and groan, because there are a few desirable gifts that everyone tries to get—a six-pack of microbrewed beer, a tin of gourmet biscotti, a coffee thermos; a handful of duds—a Chia Pet, a porcelain clown, a squeaky mouse toy; and some that are too wacky to classify—a rubber fireman puppet, The Complete Pizza Party in a Can. In the end, Marie and I wind up with a bottle of sparkling wine and an Aquaman toothbrush holder, which I actually like, but then Kyle sees it and wants it, so I give it to him.

  At the end of the evening, my father escorts us to the door and helps us into our coats.

  “How’d you make out?” he asks.

  We show him our lone bottle.

  “Hmm, not so hot. Then take these.” He shuttles two gift bags our way, then adds conspiratorially, “Don’t open them here. I don’t have enough for everyone.”

  We wait till we’re back at Marie’s to open them, and I figure he just felt sorry for us and gave us something generic like cookies or a fruitcake. But Marie opens hers, and it’s soft and feminine, a bath set, with salts and a candle and an array of scented lotions and creams and washes, the good ones, and it seems just right for her. And mine, well, mine is a book, leather-bound with gilded pages and fancy endpapers: The Collected Stories of Sherlock Holmes.

  “You like those?” she asks.

  I nod, and despite myself, I’m a little choked up. “My favorites when I was a kid.”

  I call my father the next morning to thank him for everything: the evening, the gifts.

  “My pleasure,” he says, and there’s a long pause, and when he speaks again, his voice is a little emotional. “I’m glad you brought Marie. She’s a special one.”

  It’s only much later, after Marie has gone to work and I’ve graded the last batch of essays and I’m on my way to school to drop off my grades, that I understand his shaky voice: of all the girls I’ve ever dated—the high school crushes and fellow summer camp counselors and art majors and working girls, like Hannah—this is the first one he’s ever met.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  With Christmas only days away, we plan one final trip to the mall. All the heavy lifting is done—gifts for my mom and her parents, Bradley and Skyler, Rosie, Scott and Melinda and Kyle—and now we’re left with a few odds and ends. We finish up in the early afternoon and bring all those goodies to the car, then trek back inside and go our separate ways, to browse. Of course, when we reconvene at six, we’ve browsed our way into a hundred or so bags whose contents we can’t share with each other at the moment. We head back to her place for dinner, since we’re so poor now that we may never eat out again. Even so, that doesn’t stop me from going out the next day, while she’s at work, to make one more purchase, something that wasn’t on any of the lists she gave me.

  Thanksgiving was a slipshod affair, thanks to Jason, but Christmas will be a different story. We’ve got it all mapped out. Christmas Eve: Mass, then over to Skyler’s for dinner, putting up a tree, watching It’s a Wonderful Life, and a sleepover. Christmas morning: opening presents at my mom’s with Scott, Melinda, and Kyle. Christmas evening: opening presents at her parents with all the relatives. In fact, there’s only one thing that could ruin our plans, and it has nothing to do with Jason.

  Mass is at five, and it’s festive, upbeat, a celebration. But how can it not be? It’s a birthday party. The church is decked out with Christmas trees and lights, swags of evergreen, and wide-eyed kids in velvet dresses and clip-on ties who know what happens tonight; and every ten minutes or so we’re singing carols (not “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” or “White Christmas,” but “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World,” which put you in the mood just the same). Marie isn’t a very good singer, but it doesn’t really matter because she enjoys herself and sings along just fine. The service lets out around six fifteen, and it’s still snowing, which means everything is frosted over like cake icing, glittery and white. Since we have time to kill—we’re not due over at Skyler’s till seven—I suggest, nonchalantly, that we drive a couple blocks over to Forest Park for a stroll.

  Forest Park is thirteen hundred acres of zoo and art museum and outdoor amphitheater and ponds and jogging trails, and on a summer’s evening, the place is swarming with people. Not so tonight, on Christmas Eve, in the snow. As we make our loop around one of the ponds, the Grand Basin, Marie leaning into me for support, which I like, snow crunching under our shoes, the only other spot getting any action is the hill that sweeps down toward us. A few kids and adults are out on sleds and saucers, giving it a go.

  I gesture to a bench. “Shall we?” I suggest, and she nods.

  We sit with our shoulders together, hand in gloved hand, quiet, listening, watching. I start to get the feeling we’re in a Norman Rockwell painting: the sledders laughing and hollering and making their runs, the silhouette of the art museum at the top of the hill, the snow splashing around us, tumbling into the dark waters of the pond and rippling the surface. I realize this is my moment, my perfect opportunity to tell her all the things I’ve rehearsed, how I love her kindness and generosity and forgiving and caring heart, and just her, plain and simple, the whole package, the way she walks and hitches her thumbs in her jeans and tilts her head and flicks her hair out of her eyes and lets her eyes bug out sometimes, on purpose, to express cartoon-like shock, the way she sits and sleeps and picks up the phone, and if I were God or whoever and had the power to start the whole human race and base it on one person, it would be her, with every feature and expression and trait, and I couldn’t love her any more than I do, even if I had a thousand more years to try. And then I open my mouth to say it.

  “Cold, isn’t it?”

  She shrugs. “A bit.”

  Son of a bitch. “Do you want me to grab a blanket?”

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  “I have one in the car. It’s no problem for me to get it.”

  “Mitch, I’m fine. I swear.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Jesus. I need to stop talking. And breathe. And regroup. I start small. “The sledders look like they’re having fun.”

  “Yeah, they do.”

  “Ever come sledding here?”

  “Not really. We had a great hill near our house, so that’s where we went. I came over with Rosie a couple times in high school, so she could meet guys. Never on Christmas Eve, though.”

  Ah, Christmas Eve. My way back on track. “Remember what you were doing on Christmas Eve last year?”

  She narrows her eyes. “Hmm. I won’t swear to it, but I think I was still driving in from North Carolina. I might’ve just been getting in around this time, or a little before. How about you?”

  “Over at my mom’s. We did Christmas Eve there, then Midnight Mass.”

  I take a deep breath, one that’s a little shaky on the exhale part, and my heart knows what’s coming next, so it starts jumping around in my chest.

  “Marie, I know we have lots of separate memories about our past Christmas Eves, which is natural, since we didn’t know each other till this one. But what I’m thinking is that I’d like it if we didn’t have any more Christmas Eves, or any eves, really, where we didn’t have the same memories. Though not that we won’t remember some things differently, because two people can go through the same experience and have different memories about some of the details, like did I wear a brown shirt or blue one to the party, and maybe you think it was brown and I think it was blue, so we have to try to remember which shoes and pants I wore. Which really isn’t a big deal, though, even if we never agree on which it was.” Je
sus. I’m sweating despite the snow. “Do you have any idea where I’m going with this?”

  Her hands go up toward her mouth, and they’re trembling. “Maybe. I think.”

  “Good.”

  I get down on my knee in front of the bench and pull out a small box and flip it open, and it’s all by the book and utterly clichéd—a thousand proposals from a thousand stories and books and movies, and this is the best I can come up with?—and I’m about to pass out, but I’m also about to cry.

  “Marie, will you marry me?”

  For a moment I’m not sure she heard me, because nothing happens, but then her nostrils begin to flare and her lips quiver and her eyes well up, and her hands don’t know what to do with themselves, so they just tremble even more, and do something like a clap, then grab for the ring and stop, and we both laugh, and we both start to cry a bit, and finally she gets it out, as if she had to.

  “Yes.”

  I’m sure there will come a day when I tell her all those things I had in my head, about how much I love her, and why I love her, and how wonderful she is, and how lucky I am to have her. But not now. Now we just hug. And from the way I’m hugging her, and the way she’s hugging me back, I get the feeling that even if I meet with some freakish tongue accident tomorrow and lose my power to speak and never get those words out, she’ll know exactly what I was trying to say.

  The next twenty-four hours are a blur. We go to Skyler’s and my mom’s and her parents, and uncork the announcement each place, and get showered with kisses and hugs and handshakes and women clamoring to see her ring and men clapping me on the back to offer Congrats!; and there is so much of this over the next few days—at the studio, her salon, New Year’s parties—and I’m so proud and exhilarated and tempted to sprint straight to Chicago to ask Oprah if I can hop up and down on her sofa and say “I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love” that I decide the early days of an engagement should have their own name. I tell Marie.

  “Honeymoon,” she says.

  “How so?”

  “It’s the ‘honeymoon phase’ of our engagement.”

  I try to be gentle. “Nope. Won’t work. We already use honeymoon for marriage.”

  “So.”

  “So? Put it this way. You won’t be planning for the ‘Fourth of July’ of our engagement, will you? It’s our wedding. And we won’t celebrate the ‘birthday’ of our marriage: it’s our anniversary. Important ideas need their own names, not one borrowed from something else. Make sense?”

  “No. Not really. I still like honeymoon.”

  But not me. I decide to take a Native American approach. They had a great knack for calling things the way they saw them. For example, they noticed that a big river seemed to stretch everywhere, so they called it the “father of all waters”: Mississippi. Or they noticed a guy who liked to dance with wolves, so they called him “Dances with Wolves.” So what’s this early stage of being engaged like? It’s like waking up every day and noticing something different, or fresh, or changed from the night before, that there’s a new bud or bloom or splash of color, and life seems bounteous and bursting at the seams, and it makes you want to be a poet, even if you should stick to fiction. It’s like spring. Springtime days! Only that doesn’t do it. So I go for the Spanish. Primavera days. But that sounds like a sales pitch at the Olive Garden. So I narrow it down to the element of spring I like most: the smells. Flowers, sure, and honeysuckle and jasmine and lilac, but just the smell of grass clippings and wet earth, Mother Nature spritzing on a bit of fragrance. Perfume days. Dias perfumados. Perfect.

  Katharine calls from New York a couple weeks into January. At first I think she’s calling to congratulate me on my engagement, but I’m getting my worlds confused. How would she know? Rosie? Marie’s Uncle Ted? Page Six? We chat about the holidays, which I tell her were great, and she says hers were very nice, too, though it wasn’t all fun and games. She had some work to do.

  “We found a publisher,” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “We found a publisher. For Catwalk Mama. My agent’s on the line with us and she can explain all the details, since she did all the work. Say hello to Susannah Berg.”

  I say hello to Susannah Berg.

  “I’ll get right to it, Mitch,” Susannah says in a voice that belongs on radio: rich, sonorous, confident. “I made the rounds with Catwalk Mama, and let me tell you she caused quite a stir. People talking beach book of the year. Blockbuster. Movie rights. I almost took it to auction. But I think I found us an excellent fit: Sheldon Leifer at Regency House.”

  Beach book of the year? Blockbuster? Movie rights? “Uh, sounds good.”

  “And Bradley?” asks Katharine.

  Bradley? Who cares about Bradley? Oh, Bradley. “I can’t speak for her, for certain. But I think she’ll be pleased.”

  “Excellent,” Susannah says. “Then we need to move quickly on this one, because Mr. Leifer is over the moon about it and wants it ready for an early summer release. You know how it works from here, right?”

  “Like the back of my hand.” I pause. “A refresher would be good, though.”

  “Okay, I’ll break it down. As the agent for the book, I’m the one who’ll negotiate a deal with the publisher. In ordinary cases, an agent would directly represent the writer, Bradley. But in this case, since she already has an agent—you—both of you are my clients. Make sense?”

  “So far.”

  “Good. Now, when I strike a deal with the publisher, he cuts me a check for the full amount, called the advance. Let’s use real numbers here, just to keep it simple. Let’s say half a mil.”

  “Half a what?”

  “Half a million. Five hundred thousand. That’s probably not the exact amount, but I want to keep things round. From that check, I take my share, seven and a half percent. Thirty-seven thousand, five hundred. Then I cut a check to you for the remainder, you take your thirty-seven five, and Bradley gets the rest.”

  “You do have a contract with her, don’t you?” Katharine interjects.

  “Oh, sure. No doubt.”

  “Smart man. Sometimes people assume just because it’s family, they don’t have to worry about that. But money makes people do strange things. Sorry, Susannah, back to you.”

  “Not much more to say. Other than, after the publisher has recouped the advance amount, based on books sold, we all get a percentage on each book sold thereafter, called a royalty. And that’s how it works. Any questions?”

  “Just one. You used half a million as the advance amount. Why that number?”

  “Because I think that’s what we can expect. Probably a little more, but not much.” She pauses. “Unless you want to strike out on your own with this. If you think you can do better, more power to you.”

  “No, no, not at all. That amount sounds good. I was thinking in that range anyway so, no, let’s just stick with it.”

  “Great. Now, all I need is for you and Bradley to come up here next week and meet with the publisher to seal the deal.”

  All the air gets sucked out of the room. “You mean both of us come up? Bradley and me? In person? Aren’t these things usually handled through the mail?”

  “Typically, yes. But this is far from typical, Mitch. We’re on a crash publication schedule. There’s a half-million-dollar advance in play. We have an author with two agents.” She pauses. “There won’t be a problem with that, will there?”

  “Well, now that you mention it…” Then I explain to Susannah all the Emily Dickinson stuff about Bradley, shy bird and all. Which means she might not come.

  “Oh my,” Susannah says, making no effort to mask her impatience or alarm. “Uh… Katharine, a little help?”

  “Look, Mitch,” Katharine steps in, her voice a skosh to the good side of scolding, “I get it that Bradley’s reclusive and sensitive. And to be honest, Susannah and I both like the mystery-author-veiled-in-shadow part of it. Sheldon does too. But mystery author or not, Sheldon wants to meet with everyone f
ace-to-face before he signs off on this. And trust me: he’s not going to budge on that. If you don’t show up with Bradley, the whole deal goes kaput. She needs to be here.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Don’t just try, Mitch. Do it. I’ve gone to bat for her in a big way. So have you. Susannah has worked her rear off. I don’t think that’s asking too much. Do you?”

  “No.” I feel like a reprimanded schoolboy.

  “Great. Then I’ll let you talk to Susannah about the details, when and where we’re going to meet. You get the two of you up here, I’ll take care of the hotel. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  I am that close to half a million dollars. And that far away.

  When I tell Marie I’m getting published, she throws her arms around me and starts jumping up and down and nearly gives me whiplash. When I tell her the amount Susannah tossed out, suddenly all the jump is gone and she’s quiet as a monk at a morgue.

  “Oh my god,” she finally whispers. Then she looks around the room, like she’s checking for spies or surveillance devices or hidden cameras. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  “I am. And all I have to do is fly out there and meet with the publisher…” But here, where my voice should be shooting to the moon with excitement, it trails off.

  “Except…”

  “Except… I have to bring my cousin with me. My female author cousin. Bradley.”

  For a long time neither one of us speaks.

  “What’re you going to do?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  I remember an old comedy skit where a guy wore half a tuxedo and half an evening gown, split right down the middle, and he could be a man or woman, depending on which profile he showed. There’s also Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire. Those two got away with it. But something tells me none of that will work for me.