Otherwise Engaged (17 page)

Nothing superior has been invented in my lifetime. It’s all chemotherapy and cellular phones.

Four hours after we arrived, the shoot was canceled. The French authorities had misunderstood the date on the location permits.

Unfortunately, they explained to our producer Micky as he suffered an apoplexy, the site was unavailable for the next two days in question, due to a large wedding that was taking place for a local fragrance giant.

They really do have a marvelous sense of humor. It’s going to cost the client about ninety thousand dollars.

I’ll stay the weekend and fly back Sunday. I am bathed with relief.

This proves two things: (1) As a professional, I am a failure, and (2) I am controlling the world with my mind.

I went to look at the Hôtel Panthéon, where we are staying for our honeymoon. The room was very sweet, with a canopy bed and a small reading chaise. They let me take photographs to show Michael, even though the room was occupied by another couple who were out sight-seeing. When I develop these pictures, I will be able to piece together their lives from the belongings and the disarray. I will know whether they are in love, whether they will last.

They are us, is what I imagine.

Wandered through the Rue du Buci, the daily open-air market. I purchased three pairs of shoes. In this country it seems possible to buy no pairs of shoes, or three pairs, but never just one or two. I also bought a bag of cherries and mini-bananas. Michael would have loved the minute white radishes, the array of roasted chickens, the soft cheeses. The huge pans of paella, and scrambled eggs with truffles.

I photographed the fruit for him. The tiny ladybug tomatoes.

I don’t want to miss him so much. I want to be able to turn it down. Instead I live with a rock in my heart. I walk through Paris, carrying it. Maybe this is what they mean by the ball and chain.

• • •

The eve of my return. I have just spent four days eating cheese. Cheese for breakfast, cheese and salad for lunch, and after dinner, I choose from a selection of cheeses.

It strikes me that my arms are as big as bolognas; swollen, outsized. I walk for hours around Paris, corpulent and alone. I drag my feet like a tired six-year-old.

My wedding dress has short sleeves.

Called Michael and wept into the phone.

He said, “Everything’s all right.”

“Do you still love me?” I asked.

“Of course.”

He hasn’t seen me, is why. He doesn’t know.

I am on the plane flying next to a French teenage girl. Her arms are like sticks. The stewardess brings me a bowl of macadamia nuts and cashews. I feel she is hostile as she pushes banana liqueurs and Godiva chocolates on me after the dinner service. Her arms are normal.

I can’t stop looking at people’s arms.

An overwhelming sense of panic and fear. I have to lose twenty pounds before the wedding. I have to get on the ground and out of this airplane. And I have to go back in time.

What I’m realizing is, I am too old to get married. I am an old maid, with fat arms.

I can’t possibly get away with this.

Michael picked me up at customs. He hugged me very tightly and then he discovered his watchband had broken, and his chronograph watch had popped off at the airport.

I believe this means his time is up.

• • •

Dreamed about my old high-school boyfriend last night. I am telling him I am getting married, and he has no reaction. He is not happy for me, but he is happy to see me. He leads me away to a bedroom, where I say, “Wait, I can’t do this.”

“Even in your dreams, you’re faithful,” says Reuben. Making a note of it.

In the past week I have dreamed of Jackson Kent, also. Jackson and I met in a poetry class, taught by Philip Levine, who looked like a bricklayer and who recently won the Pulitzer. Jackson resembled a young Brando. I thought.

I feel I’m in the wrong tunnel. I want to go forward, but I keep taking the wrong exit and going back. I am plagued by advance nostalgia for my single days.

I was watching the movie
Truly Madly Deeply
, where the heroine’s boyfriend comes back from the dead and at first she’s elated but then she just wants him out. She wants the bathroom back again.

Of course the first thing she does once he does dematerialize is buy a toothbrush and bring it over to this other guy’s house. And you can see where they’re going to end up married.

What Anaïs Nin says is that the dream is always running ahead. To catch up, to live for the moment in unison with it, that is the miracle.

People were supposed to return the response cards, but many of them haven’t. These are people I naturally assumed would be thrilled and would reply immediately. Now I have
to call them and ask them about it, and I have to be nice and not say what I would like to say.

“Hello? I’m sorry to bother you but is it too much
fucking trouble
to send that little card back? I put a stamp on it. But maybe you need me to come over to your house and carry you to the mailbox.”

In light of these developments, there ought to be a way to uninvite the people who are disturbing me. I need a longshoreman named Vito to visit these people and quietly but clearly uninvite them. Maybe rough them up a little.

I want others to experience pain. I believe it would lessen mine.

I was in Nordstrom buying a strapless bra for my wedding dress, when a woman approached me and held out a black Donna Karan nightshirt. She was around seventy, with brown-dyed hair wrapped in a chiffon scarf, wearing big orange glasses and sensible shoes. She spoke with a Russian accent.

“Vood you look at this?” she asked, holding out the garment.

There is a loose thread on the hem of the nightshirt. I look back at her eyes, big as apricots behind her glasses.

“First, I vant you to look at the name on the label.” She points carefully with one finger. She is giving me the answers to a test that will be coming up later, her manner suggests.

I look. It says Donna Karan Intimates.

“A pathetic voomin. Now look at za price.” She points again.

I do. Eighty-eight dollars.

I look back at her. For the first time in weeks, I am fully present.

Then she takes this loose black thread on the hem and she pulls it. I think she is just making a point, but she keeps pulling it until her arm is fully outstretched.

“Have you ever met her?” she asks. I realize she is talking about Donna Karan.

“No,” I say.

“A piece of trash,” she says.

For emphasis, she says it like two sentences. A piece. Of trash.

She walks away still holding the nightshirt. I see her headed for the young blond clerk with the pageboy haircut. I am mesmerized, but I look away, because I am also afraid of her. Of what she knows.

I picked up my wedding band yesterday at Shreve’s. It has tiny diamonds along the outside that go halfway around the band. I couldn’t afford the one with the diamonds that go all the way around.

While I was there, I discussed engraving with Reed, our salesman. Reed told me about an engaged couple who had
FOREVER
engraved along the inside of their bands. They wanted the word
FOREVER
repeated as many times as it would fit, all along the inside of the rings. He had it done, and delivered the rings. They called him back three days later and asked if he could take the rings back, return their money, and sand the engraving off. He said, “I guess so.”

• • •

This morning Michael said that I was a gift from God to him. He said he thought it was because he had started volunteering for Project Open Hand, shelling peas for four hours every Tuesday. I give money to the La Casa de las Madres women’s shelter and to San Francisco Suicide Prevention, but not that much.

I don’t know how I got Michael. Maybe I just had a store credit from some other very lonely and shitty life.

I
called Dusty. I hadn’t heard from him in a few months, nor had he responded to my wedding invitation, not even to ridicule it.

I dial his number: 555-7029. He answers on the tenth ring.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he said.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

There is a long pause, uncharacteristic of him. He would usually have said, Just sitting here on my ass. Or, Making coleslaw. He does not say either of those things. He lets a little silence well up between us, and then he says, “I’ve been sick. Actually, I just had my spleen removed.”

“Why?” I ask. Doom is creeping up my backbone. Dusty is gay, middle-aged.

“Well, I might as well drop the bomb. Are you sitting down?”

“Yes.” Why do people always ask if you’re sitting down? I think.

“OK.” Big irritated sigh. “I’ve been HIV positive since 1989.”

“Oh.” The horrible urge to laugh comes over me, as it always does with shock. On the other end of the line I hear Mary Beth, the Christian QVC host, demonstrating folding silk tote bags from Indonesia.

“I’m so sorry you have to go through this,” I say. I am speaking from somewhere above myself. “I love you,” I say. I think it is the first time I have ever said it. Then I ask, “Do you need anything?”

Like a new spleen? I think. I am an idiot. Why God doesn’t want me to rush home.

“Have you told Ray?” I ask.

Ray is Dusty’s best friend.

“I can’t,” he said, with the dead-set finality of a Texan. I cain’t.

When I climbed in bed last night, Michael was already asleep. He smelled like hazelnuts.

I don’t tell him about Dusty. Telling him would legitimize something I am not willing to legitimize.

Besides, Dusty’s doctors have told him he’s going to be around for a long time.

But they lie.

• • •

Dusty is the only person I know who still uses butter. He fries chicken in a deep cast-iron skillet. I stopped by one day and found him alone, making a double batch of peach tarts, with fresh peaches. He had rolled the dough from scratch and was piling the tarts, warm, onto tiered servers. We both ate four.

Before he moved to Manhattan from San Francisco in 1990, he once carried a black iron candelabra to my door, unannounced, then walked briskly in, attached it with picture-frame wire, and wrapped a red paisley scarf around the base. And left, screaming away in his orange truck with the gold wheel spokes.

He always wears a white baseball cap, the dirtier the better. He has worn his hair Marine short since before it was the fashion. He rarely shaves but has never had a beard or mustache. He has a permanent stubble, flecked with gray.

He is the worst gossip I have ever known, but has never to my knowledge hurt anyone, man or woman or animal.

He says “fuck” more than anyone I know, somehow making it sound funny each time. In his mouth the word “cool” becomes two syllables. Coo-ull.

Unsatisfied with the words available to most people, he frequently makes up his own words, many of which can be used as a verb or an adjective or a standard of measure. Whump, glunk, gronk.

“You just fuckin’ glunk a whole bunch of it on there, and then bake it.”

As a chef his measurements are quixotic, known only to him and performed by eye. A recipe has to be done in his presence to be effectively transferred. I have his recipes for
roasted mustard turnips, cabbage and rice soup, and corn fritters made with Jiffy mix.

I realize as I write this that I am cataloging. I am storing up what is his.

I call Dusty again.

He sounds bad. We talk about nothing. Nothing is simplest to talk about, once the reaper has you in his sights.

Right before we hung up, he told me a story. He told me that as a young man, he had always said he didn’t want to live past fifty. He had sworn not to get old, and had specified the age.

“Fifty and that’s it,” Dusty said. “I used to say that.”

He laughed ruefully, as though he had bet on a wrong horse.

Dusty is forty-nine and a half.

Ray phoned this afternoon. I was in bed with a head cold.

“Hedo?”

“Dusty’s taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “It’s Ray,” he added, as an afterthought.

“Where are you?” I said.

“I’m at his place.” He sounded elaborately casual, as though it hadn’t required an airplane. Despite everything, I feel glad that they are together, that Dusty has told him.

“Don’t worry about coming out here right away,” Ray said. “It’s not like he’s going to die or anything,”

“OK,” I said.

I hung up and dialed United.

“Where are you going?” Michael asked.

“Dusty’s dying,” I said.

As I pulled up in the cab I sensed something up there, crouched over his apartment building. Waiting.

Walking down the driveway, gravel crunched beneath my rubber sandals. This is one of the sounds of summer, I thought. One of the sounds he will never hear again. I began to cry.

Later, I thought. Not now. Now you smile. You act like this is not happening.

He lay in bed propped on pillows, wrapped in an Indian blanket, surrounded by his friends and his art, which was crammed into every available nook. Tall brightly painted carved figures, embracing in pairs, some of them carrying their own head. Some with their hands clamped over their mouths.

Everyone he knew was either there or on their way. Or they didn’t know.

In less than three months he’d lost half his body weight. His hair was mostly gone, smattering his head in spiky gray patches. His head was wrong, lopsided. He looked like the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
after the flying monkeys had gotten to him. Slumped over, shocked.

And we rush around trying to fit the stuffing back in.

He kept attempting to sit up. He’d succeed for a minute or two and then he’d lie back down.

I held his hand. His hands had shrunk to baby hands, puckered at the wrist. His liver had failed; he had no spleen. The virus had him.

I would have prayed, if I’d felt there was something up there other than that fucking chariot.