Otherwise Engaged (20 page)

She hands me a small white pillbox with a needle and thread in it and a picture of Jesus on the front. She holds a tiny blue flower, sewn of cloth, in her other hand.

“Is Jesus OK?” she asks. “Some people are offended by Jesus. If so, I can cover him with this blue flower.”

“Jesus is fine,” I say.

She puts the flower back in her pocket; I finger the small white round box. Jesus smiles up at me. He never got married, is what I am thinking. All the really great ones don’t.

“OK, so tuck that in your purse.”

I do this. I feel much more prepared.

“Now. You’re going to get your shoes today. I want you to wear them at home, as much as you possibly can between now and the wedding. And then I want you to go out into the street and scuff them.

“Because otherwise, you are going to fall down.”

When she says “fall down,” I hear “fail.”

I write down the rules. I write down everything she says.

“Well, that’s it,” she declares. “Good luck.”

She is seated with her hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead at me, as though I am about to dematerialize to a secret mission on Pluto.

When we stand up, I give her a big hug. My cheek is against her long hair, which smells like pine. I pull away and walk across the front lawn, carrying my wedding dress in a white plastic zipper bag.

I don’t want to leave her little ramshackle house. It seems to me to be the center of some great concentration of wisdom.

But I do leave. As I am leaving everything.

Last night I took three Sominex just to attempt sleep. My body ached as if every muscle were clenched in anticipation of a head-on collision. What if you get married and you hate it? What if you have an affair. Would he leave you, or would
you stay together? What if he has an affair. What if he doesn’t; does that mean he’s finally old? What if he turns into your father. Sitting in an armchair looking bitter and hating everyone on television. Consider how Beth and Robert broke up, he was an older man too. Exactly eight years older, just like Michael and me. What if Michael ends up living on a houseboat in Santa Barbara, just like Robert? Would I be relieved, like Beth is?

I don’t want to be relieved. I want to care. But I’m too numb, and we haven’t had sex in three weeks. Also, my shoulders are throbbing like a giant bit them.

What if he goes bald. What if we can’t find a house. What if I can’t have a baby.

What if I can? Your life is
over
, sugar.

What if you buy a house and get pregnant, and lose your job and have a baby. And you end up hating him. Fornicating with handymen while he’s at work to get back at him for ruining your life and taking away the expense accounts and impromptu trips to New York and London and Mondrian Hotel room service. What then.

I worry and wonder, deep in the tomb-silent night.

I wish to go backward, to when I was still longing for marriage and felt it would fix everything. Things were simple and unfulfilled then, like the night before you begin a vacation, a perfect canvas of time unblemished by events. It’s like when Isaac Mizrahi said whenever he goes to Paris he just wants to have a cup of coffee and fly back home.

This morning, I told Michael I was tired. I didn’t want to go to work, go on our honeymoon, or even go to the kitchen. I didn’t want to worry about whether he’s sent his mother a birthday gift or whether the caterer will remember
to return the bud vases to the florist or whether we took the recycling out for pickup because it’s Thursday. What I want to do is be alone, and cease taking care of anything. Anything.

But I am going to get married, because it is time and because I don’t want anyone else to have him.

Four weeks until I walk the aisle. Something dreadful happened when it went below thirty days. Less than a month is real. I want to do it, though. I do.

I do
. Jesus it really comes down to that, doesn’t it.

I wonder now why having a rabbi seemed a good idea. He’s just going to make it more serious, with that white beard.

I want a woman minister. A lesbian woman named Heron. Someone a vengeful God won’t take too seriously. Someone I could laugh off later and say, Oh we were just kidding. You didn’t think we were serious did you?

It’s not just the rabbi: I have a series of regrets. Too many to go into. People I invited, people I didn’t invite, and the fact that I didn’t, say, marry Jackson Kent. Or one of the Baldwin brothers. Or Wesley Snipes.

It just hit me that I am never going to have a black man. The black man window is closed. I am never going to have another twenty-five-year-old. I don’t necessarily want them, but I want the option of them. I want their window left open.

What I’ve heard, actually, is that marriage kills sex. That after you get married, you never actually have sex again. First frequency goes and then oral sex goes and then it all goes. I’ve heard.

In that case I can’t be expected to be ready. I’m a young woman, thirty-six is still young. Except for a first marriage. Thirty-six is far too old for a first marriage.

Maybe I can get off on a technicality.

This morning Michael is talking on the phone when he covers the receiver and says to me, “Your Blue Cross is not applicable in Europe and is not honored.”

We are spending eight days in France for our honeymoon. He has just signed himself up for supplemental European health insurance coverage, and is wanting to sign me up too. I know this is a ridiculous waste of money. I smile and nod.

“There’s someone else I want to put on the medical insurance policy,” he says into the phone. “My future wife,” he says, and actually giggles.

When he hangs up, I ask him if he thinks we should also bring two miner’s helmets, just in case the sun explodes.

“You won’t laugh when you’re lying down there with a broken leg paying ten thousand dollars,” he says.

“Lying down where?” I ask.

“Some hospital in France.” He says it as though there will be buckets full of shoes with feet still in them, and no anesthesia. Just men with berets and rusty saws.

“Go ahead, laugh,” he says.

I do. It feels good.

Nineteen days until the wedding.

I’m not quite ready. I know, because I want to laugh hysterically when people ask me if I’m ready.

I’m not ready to be old, or bored, or fat. All of which I believe marriage represents. I’m not ready to be my mother; I just started looking good. Not my mother, not yet. Not ever.

If I get married, I’ll have to have a baby right away. They’ll make me. I am not sure who they are, only that they exist. I’ll have to have a baby, which will automatically make me a mother. Beyond repair. Pot holders and kitchen magnets and big bras. Good God.

I’m not ready never to have my own apartment again. I’m not ready to erase all possibility of a pink-and-red bathroom, which I am never going to have if I get married.

I’m not ready to watch Michael grow old slowly. I want to remember him as he is right now, with shiny black hair and muscles and his own teeth. I’m not ready for dentures in a glass by the bed and stocking caps and brown slippers and gray alien skin.

I don’t want to go forward, I just decided. I would like to go sideways. Revisit recent highlights.

The day at Stinson Beach when Michael wore that blue-and-white bandanna on his head. The trip to Boston for his brother David’s wedding, the long tight black velvet dress I wore, and Michael in a tuxedo and that room at the Hilton with the tall maroon curtains. I had a good haircut, too. One of the only good haircuts I’ve ever had.

I would like to go back there. To good haircuts and being thirty-five and tight black size-8 dresses and room service hors d’oeuvres, and other people’s weddings.

If I am honest with myself, I wasn’t happy then either, I remember. I was secretly miserable.

Because I wanted to get married.

W
e go to dinner with Lesli and her husband, Henry, at Gordon Biersch for my thirty-seventh birthday. I examine Michael from across the table. He seems strange, but nice. The boyfriend of someone I know but not too well. I could steal him away from her, if I decided to.

I talk to Lesli, and Michael talks to Henry.

I sanctimoniously order the grilled
ahi
which arrives raw, like slices of human flesh. It’s so disgusting I can only marvel at it. I feel beyond food, although alcohol is definitely my friend.

We drink two bottles of ZD Chardonnay. It may be that I am trying to pickle myself, preserving the old me. Find a big jug and just float.

When we arrive home, I grab the phone and go out back to smoke.

I call Jill and tell her I feel I’m slipping away. The death of the maiden, as Reuben would say, which makes it sound like a ridiculously youthful experience. I haven’t been a maiden for twenty years. This maiden crap just pisses me off.

What’s perishing is me, the me who was single. The me who was me, for as long as I have known me.

“I’m dying,” I say to Jill.

I wait for her to tell me I’m being ridiculous.

“I know,” she says.

“I am ET lying in the ditch,” I murmur. “And nobody is going to save me, no kids on flying bicycles. I’m just going to die there.”

We laugh.

I am so very afraid.

I maintain a conviction that I am the only one who has experienced this. The rest of the engaged world, I fear, is doing fine. Just fine.

As I write this I can hear the crazy South African landlady outside telling her feather-duster dog,
“Sit down. Get up. Sit down. Get up.”

I see Reuben. I tell him that it is now twelve days until the wedding, and it isn’t at all the way I thought it would be. At all.

I feel angry, as though he is on the Board.

I tell Reuben how perverse it is to have changed places with Michael. How just when he stops being afraid of marriage, I start. I tell him how I realize now that it is no accident that I haven’t gotten married before. I used to think it
was an accident, an error. That I hadn’t met the right person. But now I know that I didn’t get married because I didn’t want to, and I know why. Because it feels horrible.

Reuben says, “It’s like Disneyland, where you go into a dark tunnel and the monsters jump out at you and the man with the head of an alligator, but it’s not real.”

“Why isn’t it real?” I ask.

“Because they’re all projections.”

“Oh yeah,” I say. I knew that.

“It’s the Tunnel of Horrors,” Reuben says. Grinning.

The Tunnel of Horrors. A very real place. I feel I could reach out and touch its clammy sides and hear the laughter of the crazy gondolier.

“I think you can escape it,” Reuben says. “I think it’s like an evil spirit.” He claws at the air with one hand as he says this.

I wonder what Reuben does for fun, I think. He seems to be having fun now. I wonder if I am having fun. I suspect that in some sick way I am, just like on a roller coaster. Putting my arms up in the air and screaming.

“Projections,” I say.

“That’s right,” he says.

I feel like I’m learning Spanish by phonograph. I keep repeating the word for “artichoke,” but I know I really can’t speak Spanish.

Then I hand him the directions to the wedding. He’s coming.

I was looking at Michael’s feet last night and they look just like Picasso’s feet. A small, troubling thing.

• • •

Ten days until the wedding. I’m off work now, until after the honeymoon.

I call Lana. I tell her that I hope what I’m feeling is normal.

“It’s a sentence,” she admits, talking about marriage. “More so for a woman than for a man.

“But it’s good,” she says, with equal conviction.

“The moments that are great are spread out more. Plus you get these reality checks; like you’re ill and he makes you soup, and brings it to you in bed. Or you hear about someone whose husband is sixty and still screws around with secretaries, and you feel so blessed.”

“Administrative assistants,” I say. She ignores me.

“You have to take the whole package. You can’t get Liam Neeson
and
George Clooney.”

“I know,” I say.

“You take the package. Like, Michael has that great East Coast Jewish thing going on. See, Raul doesn’t have that. I miss that. He has other things I like about him. But sometimes that quality that you like about them is the same one that shreds at you like a paper cut.”

“Yes,” is all I can muster up. I feel a mass of paper cuts. One big slice down the center, by the world’s biggest envelope.

Lana says, “There are times when I just look at Raul and say
Stop
. He hasn’t done anything, but I am just so aware of what he’s about to do.”

“Exactly,” I say.

“But you don’t want to ruin this time. You’ve waited for this a long time, and you and Michael are great together.”

“We are?” I ask. I thought she was going somewhere else with this.

“You are.”

I ask her the final incendiary question. I ask her if Michael’s good-looking. I need her to be my eyes, now that I’ve gone insane.

“He’s darling. And he’s sexy,” she says.

He is. I know this intellectually.

“I wouldn’t lie,” she adds. “You’re in such a good time, Eve. Just move forward.”

Ah yes. Movement. But boxcars move too. Bombs fall; women release the emergency brake on minivans full of toddlers.

Then she pivots. She says, “Besides, there are no guarantees in life.…” Her voice trails off deliciously. “What the years will bring. You don’t really know how long you’ll have together.”

I picture myself at Michael’s funeral, in a sheer black chiffon blouse. High necked, with palazzo pants. Some neutral lipstick.

“We could all end up single,” she says. “Look at my mother. Look at Aunt Daisie.”

Lana’s aunt Daisie always swore she would outlive her husband, Frank, and eventually retire with her sister, Eleanor. But Daisie died at sixty-six, leaving Lana’s mother, Eleanor, alone. Who did outlive her husband, along with outliving Aunt Daisie. Silver-haired high-cheekboned Eleanor the Impeccable, who recently told me she would like to meet a man who was like Michael. This also weighs in on his side.