Otherwise Engaged (3 page)

But nobody stopped Michael and me. Then, abruptly, he opened his wallet, drawing out a small photograph. It was a picture of his daughter leaning on a snowboard. Phoebe.

We talked on. He said that after two years with a French hair model named Gabrielle, he was in a period of domestic confusion. He made it sound as if he had a wonderful yet clumsy maid whom he might have to let go. He was, the tilt of his eyebrows suggested, waiting to see if she improved. He hoped that she would.

I remember how I drank him all in, that night, like a tulip glass of fine port. He looked both tired and supremely relaxed. His whole face seemed to recline in an expression of relaxation and hidden reserves of carnal expertise. Anyone able to write strategies for the Wesson Family of Oils is arguably prodigious, perhaps even sensual. His whole being seemed comfortably forty-one, and slightly tanned. He was a tawny port.

I looked at Michael and I saw the epitome of Nice Jewish Man spread out before me. I took in the trim watch, the good shoes carefully brushed, the lines of patience around the eyes. From her kitchen in Carmel, my mother held up a wooden spoon in silent praise of the man that sat before me discussing opera. A wave of psychic enthusiasm passed over our heads from Carmel. My mother has wanted a nice Jewish man for me since before the beginning of time. She has wanted that since before the earth was a cloud of gas.

I knew then, arranging myself at the bar stool so my DKNY Nude legs were at their best advantage, that sophistication and adoration and my mother’s eternal blessing could be mine. If only I could eliminate Gabrielle. I took a sip of wine and backed a steamroller over her in my mind. I mentally placed us all on a vacation in Paris, where Gabrielle
was from, a foreign country where they understood crimes of passion. I would ensconce myself in a hotel room adjacent to theirs. When she went out for baguette, I would pounce, some blunt object in hand. Perhaps a large hair dryer.

I saw her pinwheeling down the steps at Montmartre, flailing lifeless past the French carousel as the painted horses laughed silently and ironically. Afterward, Michael and I would accidentally meet as he walked along the Seine, and discuss his grief. Her family, of course, would handle the arrangements. We would check into the Hôtel Montalembert, because he would need to change hotels after what had happened, and it would be better if he weren’t alone.

It wouldn’t even have to be Paris, I thought. It could happen anywhere, anytime.

I wanted very badly, as Michael leaned forward across the bar and told me tales of contemporary literature, to look up and see her coffin being transported down Battery Street while a bevy of musicians played a gay Creole funeral march. I was deep in a fantasy without the hindrance of moralistic ceilings. Cardiac arrest, brain aneurysms, clinical diabetes. All of these danced like sugarplums out of my reach. I had no way to rid myself of Gabrielle. She had possession.

By midnight, we had discussed all topics that reflected well on either of us. We had held up the mirror of mutual narcissism and had not been found wanting. But it was aborted by the fact that he, Michael, had the lack of foresight to choose Gabrielle a full two years before we had been brought together by Fate. I tried not to loathe him for his insistence on having a life before meeting me, but it was - difficult.

I told him that I wanted to say something. When I drink too much wine I start to announce my sentences before they appear. He slouched forward in the solicitous way that charming men have, the way that suggests that they were just marking time until they spoke with you, marking time their whole lives.

I said, “I think you’re intelligent and funny and handsome. And I wish you were single.” I thought I was being boldly confiding. In retrospect, I realize it was like saying,
You know, there is air all around us.

He jammed his hands into his pockets, as if searching for a tidbit there that would satisfy. A minute talisman of truth which he could present in lieu of a response. Maybe he had small slips of paper with quotes from eighteenth-century poets in his pockets, waiting to be pulled forth as pithy offerings. But no. He had only credit cards and a California driver’s license with his photograph and the word “Taken.”

He decided, in the end, to save himself. He armed himself with the shield of ambiguity. Michael ran his tongue over his teeth thoughtfully. He then replied, “You may not hear from me for a long time.”

A good job, under the circumstances. Michael had managed to infer that he would be coming for me at some later time, and yet he had said nothing of the kind. He had kept himself clean. Not many men could do as much given the length of the evening, the wine consumed, and the reaction time allotted.

I admired Michael then, for all of his skills, even the ones he showed in maneuvering around me. Talking to him was deeply satisfying. Being with him held a natural pleasure. Perhaps he is gay, I thought.

But driving home alone that night, I knew two things for certain. Number one, Michael wasn’t gay. And, number two, I had met the man I was going to marry.

The next morning I drove to see my mother in Carmel. I sat in her kitchen, hungover and exhausted, and wept into my hands.

“What if he doesn’t leave her,” I said.

“He will,” she said.

Three and a half years later, he proposed.

My mother is a witch. Not a make-believe witch, not someone who dresses in black and attends outdoor all-woman festivals on the solstice. An actual witch.

Someone who knows.

Picked up the ring today. We have drinks at Le Central to celebrate. Michael has a Manhattan, which they bring in a small clear carafe with its own little ice bucket.

We make a toast.

“To us,” he says. We kiss.

Admiring the ring, I hold my arm outstretched, as if stopping traffic from advancing forward.

At the table next to us sits an older businessman with his mistress. She has thick platinum hair and a fur stole. He keeps patting her hand and calling her Sweetheart. I see the intelligence of a fox in her eyes. She smokes and watches me with great amusement.

This is all a show, her eyes suggest. We might just as well be one another.

• • •

Today I bought my first issue of Modern Bride magazine, the November issue. I have it right here. I ordered a year’s subscription, using the 1-800 number and not the business reply mail card.

I discover that holding the magazine makes me anxious. I put it down. I am wondering if there is a way to make me over and, if so, will I be able to be made back.

It strikes me that I am going to have to have a wedding. And it is going to have to be perfect, according to this magazine. There are twelve reception hints I can’t overlook. And that’s just the tip of the bayonet.

My gut feeling is, My
God
, haven’t I done enough?

M
orning. Behind the door of our only bathroom, I hear Michael brushing his teeth with his ultrasound toothbrush. It sounds as though he is filing them to points. In our rifle-shaped Victorian flat, six small rooms all choked together, I can hear everything he does. And he can hear me. We perform behind scrims.

The water is turned on in the sink, a slow stingy stream. He begins to shave. I would like to watch, but he has locked me out, along with the Cow. This is a sacred place, a site of ritual. We are none of us worthy.

Next comes the lengthy hot bath, with the loofah. He rubs his entire body with a loofah mitt. Later I hear the shower running. After draining the tub, he stands under the shower and washes his hair twice. Lather, rinse, repeat. I never repeat.

He suffers, he is the first to point out, from acute dry skin. In winter, once a month he puts a special gel on his scalp and wears a shower cap to bed. Then I call him Do-Rag Man, and if he’s in a good mood he’ll sing to me in bed, in the voice of Paul Robeson.

I can always find a man with perfect skin. But where else will I find a man who can sing the Negro spirituals?

Rain tonight, our first of the season. I came home and made Cornish game hens with potatoes and rosemary. We ate in the kitchen.

I put on a cassette tape of Tony Bennett, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which was my father’s favorite song. I start to cry. Michael looks alarmed, drops his fork, and runs over to my side of the table.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong?”

“I’m just so happy,” I say. I feel this is a delayed reaction, like in trauma victims. I’ve been hit.

He brings me a paper towel and sits back down. Then he smiles apologetically and tucks into his potatoes.

We have lit candles, tonight. I hope we will always remember to do this, but even as I hope this I know that we won’t. We will forget.

My ring throws off prisms of light. When I drive in the morning especially, I love watching the tiny rainbows splay across the leather interior of my car. I may die that way, staring at the ring. Plowing head-on into a semi, entranced. Exactly what such a person deserves.

Out in the world, everyone concentrates on the minutiae of the wedding. The dress, the caterers. People are concerned about place cards. It’s as though they don’t watch the news.

“Are you going to wear white?” a woman I hardly know asks me. It is clear from the menacing tilt of her head that she expects an answer.

Without thinking, I say no. Cream, is what I say. Inside I am astounded that this matters, that it would even come up. I am even more surprised that I have an opinion. Cream.

Yesterday I met my friend Beth for lunch at Grumpy’s. Beth is a recovering shopaholic who looks like Michelle Pfeiffer, except with very short white-blond hair and a scar on one cheek from when she went through the windshield at age five. Beth was eighty thousand dollars in debt at twenty-five; she’s been credit card free for ten years. I met her at Macy’s in 1989, where we were both buying vacuums. She said she was only allowed to do that because she was paying cash and because hers had blown up when she tried to suck up a whole bag of cat litter. I remember thinking, Finally. Someone I can relate to.

Over lunch, Beth tells me that she and her husband, Robert, don’t have sex anymore. She says it was never that great, and since Max was born, they don’t do it at all.

“But hey,” she says. “Sex isn’t everything.”

This disturbs me. Because I know, actually, that it is. Yet when she says this, I nod. It is important to me that Beth and Robert do not break up. They are one of the couples I need to believe are happy in order to pioneer my own happiness. I don’t want them to get divorced. I don’t want anyone to get divorced.

Then she says she truly loves Robert. She says it with her eyebrows raised, daring me to object.

I smile, robotic. I am thinking that she is only thirty-five. I am thinking that while sex isn’t everything, it’s not nothing either: there should be a minimum.

Beth has the mushroom gardenburger. She puts extra salt on her fries and eats them one by one, pressing them against the bottom of her plate, to pick up the excess grains.

“I do miss sex.” She sighs, as though it were a dog that ran away.

After lunch I go back to my office, close the door, and eat four chocolate Snack Well sandwich cookies.

Michael and I will be different. I will wish it so. Like in a dream where you realize you’re dreaming, and you can change things.

Michael works on a variety of packaged-goods accounts, the biggest of which is Sara Lee, home of the Rich Buttery Taste. Watching phyllo dough triangles tumble off a cookie sheet all day long can be less interesting than you’d think, yet he goes in every day, at 8 a.m. I sleep for another hour and then I get up and go to my own job, in advertising. What my partner Graham calls
another room in hell.

Graham is a twenty-five-year-old art director, the other half of our creative team. He was raised in London. His parents are around four hundred years old apiece and used to sit at home reading the
Times
with him when he was two. Then Graham grew up and moved to San Francisco and became an art director, and my first boss Katherine hired him. Then she hired me and put us together on the California Lottery account. It was all arranged before we were born.

Graham is small and wan with ice-blue eyes. His hair is orange and he wears baggy pants that almost fall off. At first glance Graham looks like a paperboy, but when you look into his eyes he turns into the head of the CIA. He can draw a razor-straight line freehand and knows how to say no to people who come from upstairs.

I rationalize that I am making advertising less awful, that the work Graham and I do is less harmful and more enlightened, because we do pro bono public service announcements for AIDS awareness and fund-raising ads for public zoos, which when you think about it are the most nihilistic fascists going and might as well exhibit their leopards in boxcars. But all that’s really a rationalization. I’m right in there, grinding it out. I’m every bit as disgusting as the people who do the cartoon cigarette billboards aimed toward minors and the makers of matchbooks that promise artistic fame and say, Can You Draw Binky?

Today Graham is at an edit session for a television commercial we have created for high-top basketball shoes. In a time-honored ritual, the art director is forced to stand by and watch as his meticulously designed scenes are questioned, maimed, and ultimately destroyed by a brand manager who swoops into the editing bay at the last minute. At this time, the company logo is customarily adjusted to fill the screen.

Graham called me toward the middle of the ritual, and whimpered in the dulcet tones of the Beaten Down. He was, however, cheered by the fact that I have spent my morning making long-distance personal phone calls and watching Kurosawa’s
Ran
on the VCR monitor in our office with the sound turned off, to the tune of
The Best of Tom Jones
played at top volume on the CD player. He feels that by
doing this instead of writing shoebox copy, I am letting freedom ring.