Marry or Burn (6 page)

 

THE SECOND ONE She met on the sidewalk in front of a café on The Ave, the main drag in the University District. This time
Lali was there to make the introduction, and when she was gone they went in and sat drinking coffee for half the day.

What did he look like?

Why did we keep asking this question? Because as her parents it was the first thing we could think of to ask. He too was tall. Tall and thin. Something in the way she said this made Sam ask how tall. Six feet, six inches.

“That's tall,” Sam said. After a minute he said, “Does he have long arms?” He did. “Long legs?” He did. “Long fingers? Really long?” Sam said, holding his palm out an inch from his own fingertips. Long. “Well,” Sam said, “I doubt you looked into his mouth to see if he has a high-arched palate.”

“What are you getting at, honey?” I said. Sam is a doctor who likes to make deductions from physical description. When his sister and her husband visited, Sam made a bet that the lump they kept talking about in their German shepherd's neck was not cancer but a benign nerve-sheath tumor, and after the biopsy they called up delighted, as if he had been the one to spare the dog.

“Marfan's syndrome,” Sam said.

Our daughter had no interest in Marfan's syndrome. To our dismay, however, she did seem interested in this young man, who, it turned out, had been living in a University District rooming house while job-hunting, but had been evicted, and had not yet found a place to live, even though he now had money in hand that his parents had wired. His name was Kevin and he was several years younger than Meg. For two nights he had slept in the open, getting to know the residents of Ravenna Park, who had befriended and sheltered him like the fairies who built the house around the girl, whose name was not Wendy, in
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
, a different book from
Peter Pan.
So he told Meg, showing her a copy in the university library where he liked
to stash his backpack and stretch his legs out and read during the day. He showed her the thick novel he had written. “Did you read it?” Sam said, because both of us could picture Meg taking it home and reading every word as she would her students' papers. No. It was his only copy.

No address. No job. I wouldn't have put much thought into the words
tall
or
short
until Meg was looking for a husband. Kevin was too tall for comfort. Forced to travel along up above everybody else, too tall to be unnoticed, so tall his height might seem to account for everything he did or didn't do. None of this could be uttered, and I was ashamed of the forebodings her father and I were sharing behind our smiles.

It was all so old-fashioned, so tinged with the foreign; it had the flavor of the sluggish, mysterious comings and goings in an opium den, this search for a husband for Meg.

“I'd like to meet this Lali,” Sam said. That would be a small step we might allow ourselves with Meg, some distance from announcing a wish to meet any of the three prospective husbands.

“Don't keep saying
this Lali
, please,” Meg said reasonably. The awful prose of Lali's descriptions had made no impression on Meg, whose degree was in anthropology and comparative religion but who was teaching composition at the community college and should have noticed Lali's style. In less than a year Lali had become her close friend.

“If she's a friend how come she had to write up these . . . compositions?” I said. “Why couldn't she just sit down with you and describe these guys honestly?”

“It was a formal arrangement,” said Meg with dignity. “And the descriptions were in her database.”

“I think she knows our Meg is a bit too kindhearted for her own good,” Sam said.

“A pushover, you mean,” Meg said.

“Not what I mean.”

“These descriptions are honest,” Meg said. “If you read them carefully, it's all there.” She grinned. It was after she met the third one, the borderline, that we were having this discussion, speaking openly about Meg's decision to try to meet someone serious, someone to consider marrying.

 

BORDERLINE
IS A PSYCHIATRIC diagnosis, not at all the ironic all-purpose label it is in lay talk. She's really borderline, we say, meaning somebody is capable of going, and might go, too far. But in the field of psychology it means something specific. It means a person damaged in childhood, usually, who has formed a personality consisting of impulsivity, paranoia, and avidity for affection.

“You mean in this entire city all this Lali could find for Meg was three creeps? For
Meg
?” Sam's blood pressure was up because the third one had proved to be a crazy man. Filmmaker! Andrei worked as a busboy in a steak-and-lobster restaurant. He was almost forty, a student at the community college.

That was when we asked if Lali was also a student there, and found out that she was.

With Andrei, Meg's good sense clicked in and she got away from him as fast as she could, though not before he wrote down her telephone number and started calling her apartment every hour. Then for some reason she agreed to go out with him, although she was already seeing Kevin.

It was Andrei's belief, as Meg assured us later it was the belief of many desperate citizens of Russia, bewildered and finally deluded by their own misfortunes since the collapse of communism, that the Jews were in charge and were intent on wiping
Christianity from the face of the earth. Christians must marry and produce children as fast as they could. Andrei had seen the card on the bulletin board advertising Lali's service and was ready on the spot.

“I am a Buddhist,” Meg said, but in a friendly way. She let him film her. He did it with an expensive movie camera—a sixteen-millimeter, not a video camera. She didn't speculate as to how he might have come by such a camera, a man who wore a bum's old wing tip shoes, gaping at the seams. He had the camera with him at his first meeting with Meg; he lined up the attachments for her to see, taking them out of a case with sculpted compartments.

How tender on the part of the male, Meg might have told her students, if she had been allowed to teach a course in her own field: this open desire to win the female. This display, like a bowerbird's, this laying out of goods and assets. And the female approaching with some secret authority, to inspect what was spread before her.

 

MEG INVITED US to dinner. Lali was already there, demure on the couch. She rose to her feet as we came in, a beautiful child dressed in a pale gray suit, slim as an incense stick. Actually she was twenty-seven and had left her family and her fiancé in Darjeeling five years before to visit a married cousin in Seattle, and stayed. Sitting beside Lali, Meg looked large and vague and worn.

“Got many clients?” my husband said as soon as we sat down to dinner, before he had his napkin on his lap.

“Just now I have forty-six,” Lali said, smiling at Meg, who must have predicted the question, and then soberly closing her dark lids big as awnings to think and holding up a finger. “Forty-seven.”

“Uh-oh, that leaves somebody out in the cold,” Meg said. We all laughed.

“So out of the forty-seven there were three who seemed to be young men who might have something in common with Meg,” said Sam with a sinister politeness.

“Well, more than half are women. This is always the case, most regrettably. And while I am happy for women to meet, I am most strictly conventional in these introductions. Men to women. So the field is somewhat smaller for the women.”

“How small?”

“I have, just now, fifteen men.”

“Out of which three, a fifth, might suit Meg? I guess that changes my sense that three is rather few.”

“Oh, Dr. Wagner, all fathers are suspicious! Of course they are! This is your daughter!” I liked the way she said
daughter
.
Doh-ta
, with soft consonants, expressing a degree of tenderness. “And my teacher!” She glanced shyly at Meg. “But I am most cautious. Very, very particular. It is not all done with computers, don't worry. It is done with the head”—she touched her smooth forehead—“the heart”—the neckline of her pink silk shell—“and luck.” She rolled the startling whites of her eyes upward under their heavy, almost disabling net of lashes.

“What about karma?” said Sam, who had had many discussions with Meg when she was becoming a Buddhist—a lax Buddhist at best, with all of her hopes—and had been reading up on Hinduism for the occasion of Lali's visit. “Why would the person that Meg's karma has earned her have to be found or chosen by somebody else?”

“Ah, yes,” said Lali, with seeming pleasure. “But karma will allow us also to meet those who will guide us properly.”

“Lali is a computer whiz as well as an
A
-student,” Meg said, as though she were making a match between us and Lali.

“And so how is it that this disturbed Russian crept in?”

“Andrei! He is someone I know! He was so surprised when the e-mail address from the bulletin was me, his friend from class!”

“Do you know him well?”

“Oh, I'm afraid I know him only well enough to like him. He is a silly boy, certainly, yes, in some ways, but he is quite trustworthy, of that I am sure.”

“He climbed in the window of Meg's apartment.”

“Well, I don't know, of course, but Russians are unlike Americans in many of their customs. That is impulsive, yes. But this boy has fallen in love. I can tell you I have heard nothing else from him for months and months but Meg, Meg, Meg.”

“It doesn't matter, really,” Meg said. “There's nothing between us.” She turned to her father. “Seriously, think of how few people you meet who are instantly likable. Well? And these three, all of them—Lali is a magician.”

We did not say that she, our daughter, found almost everybody likable.

“And what about this farmer?” said Sam. “Hard to see how he got on the list.”

“Oh, just something silly. Something I was hearing when I went to see him,” said Lali. “It was merely a laugh. His way of laughing. A most sober man, as Meg will tell you.”

“And I liked him,” said Meg.

“I'm not sure you were in a position to know that ahead of time,” Sam said.

“But yet,” Lali spoke up, smiling away Sam's remarks, “it is going to be Kevin, isn't it? Many of the signs were in his favor.”

 

THE WEDDING WAS Small, in a room of an old mansion popular for weddings in our city. Lali and Stacey, Meg's best friend,
were the attendants, and on the big round oak table we set out champagne glasses and cake. Meg was almost a vegan by this time and had not really wanted a cake, but her training as an anthropologist made her reluctant to leave it out. “Cake is sacred,” she said. “Pie is folkloric but cake is sacred.”

“No one's advocating pie. But if you have cake at your wedding you want to be able to have a piece,” said Stacey.

“And pie—why is that folkloric?” Sam wanted to know.

“Four and twenty blackbirds, Daddy.”

Really we were all afraid that Meg would take on the job herself and bake one of those dark, wet soy cakes. Stacey was afraid it wouldn't taste good, but I was afraid it would sit there like an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual substitution. Kevin instead of the handsome prince. This was before we really knew Kevin and realized he was indeed the handsome prince and no substitute. By this time he did have a job, teaching English in a private school that didn't require a teaching certificate.

Two weeks before the wedding we found a bakery that could make a rich carrot cake that no one would guess had no eggs.

Andrei crashed the wedding but Meg was able to keep things friendly. She sat with Andrei on the piano bench for a long time in her white dress with her long neck bent towards him, talking quietly, explaining, I believe, her love for the man to whom she had just finished vowing herself for life, until the pianist came and reached in from behind them to strike a loud chord. It was time for toasting and dancing to begin. The talk stopped and the chord pulsed through the crowd while Andrei pulled himself together, unclenched his fists, and agreed to leave the bench.

How strange, it occurred to me as I watched Andrei during the toasts, that both of these men Lali had plucked out of nowhere for Meg had agreed, as if a spell had been laid on them, to be hers.

Two years later Kevin had published his novel. Meg was happier than we had ever seen her. She was trying to get pregnant; she even had an anthropology course to teach, in addition to composition and The Power of Place, which had become permanently hers when Stacey got a better job. One day Kevin was standing in front of his high school juniors happily scanning “The Wanderer” when his aorta burst.

In Marfan's syndrome the aorta can be as weak and decayed as a strand of old kelp, and no one will suspect it.

After he died Meg stopped going to work. She locked the door on the apartment where they had lived, without even cleaning it, let alone subletting it while there was no salary to pay for it, and came home. It may sound as though we were the kind of parents who secretly wanted their daughter back, but in this period we came close to telling Meg she might be happier staying with Lali, who had invited her. Because there was nothing we could do but get up and go through the day with her, while hopelessly trapped in the parental obligation of rescue, with Sam already wandering the house new to his retirement and susceptible to despair. She had not come home to be with us, though, so much as to be as she had been before, thereby repudiating, even obliterating, the happiness of two years. Finding this impossible, she mourned with a silent concentration.