Otherwise Engaged (6 page)

And then Leigh was gone. Death saw my father standing in the road and the logging truck making a beeline for him, and Death said,
Hmmm. Might as well save myself the trip
. And so, Leigh too. At least that’s what I always assumed, that Jack was the primary target. I don’t know why. I suppose I can’t imagine Death fingering Leigh specifically, whereas my father had been courting Death for quite some time and had finally gotten its rapt attention.

They had been married only five years when the accident happened. She was standing beside him when the truck, loaded with wood and driven by a man named Grimes who was running behind schedule, hit them. They went together, hand in hand, into the unknown. Now they will always be married.

In a way, he was lucky.

M
y friend Dusty, who grew up in Matador, Texas, and who has been clean and sober for six years, just called from his apartment in Manhattan. He told me that he is besotted with a recovering crack-addict alcoholic named Christian who just relapsed by smoking crack with a hustler, and then they were both arrested on Eighth Avenue and Dusty had to go bail him out while the hustler spat at him.

When I suggest there might be better men to obsess on, he says, “Sure, there are other fish in the sea, but I like these, floating here on top. They’re easier to catch.” Then he says, “Christian knows my old boyfriend George, too. George took Christian to Nantucket, and while George was sleeping, Christian stole his Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch and hitchhiked back to the city and smoked it up. So I can’t tell George about Christian.”

Dusty sighs, exhaling on his Merit. He says, “It’s so Gay
As the World Turns.”

I know he is trying so hard to make it, that it is especially hard in New York, where they’re opening cushier new bars every second for people to rush into and drink themselves to death in, with sand-blasted bar stools and dishes of Kalamata olives and Moroccan trip-hop music. The problem is that Dusty is so crazy that he can’t live anywhere but New York, so he’s stuck trying to get around it, bars and all. He’s like a forty-nine-year-old person in a wheelchair who has to be aware of every single foot of land. Always on the lookout for minor elevations and potholes.

I may have to fly out there and lock him in a closet, until this crackhead thing passes.

While we are on the phone, I peel an orange and it is moldy inside. When I tell Dusty, he makes a disgusted sound and says, “I hate fruit. Fruit and vegetables.”

Then he admits that he probably doesn’t even really want Christian. Too much trouble, he says. He says he wants to be someone’s pet, so he doesn’t have to worry about money anymore. He sighs and says, “I’m too old to be a pet now. Or else I’d have to find someone sixty-five-ish, in L.A. Someone who produced Adrienne Barbeau in the seventies and invested well.

“I wonder what she’s doing now,” he adds, with real interest. As always I can hear the steady hum of the QVC channel in the distance. Since Dusty gave up alcohol, he has cross-addicted to QVC.

Dusty was the recreation leader at our middle school, growing up. He has always been exactly like this; but the adults never knew, so we were allowed to be friends. And now the adults don’t matter. Now we are the adults.

• • •

Michael and I picked out our wedding invitations, at a little store on Union Street. The salesgirl kept it light by chewing on a bran muffin and making personal calls throughout the interview. As we flipped through the books, Michael kept gravitating toward the more casual typefaces, the unadorned papers.

The first typeface he likes is plain and simple, no engraving or calligraphy.

“It just screams ‘second marriage,’ doesn’t it?” I say to the salesgirl.

“Yes.” She agrees.

“This is my first marriage,” I explain to Michael, through her.

At length we choose a different typeface for the invitations, one Michael really likes. I agree, although the
S
’s look like meat hooks.

The whole invitation-ordering process makes me uneasy. The tiny awkward couch, the salesgirl and her huge endless crumbly muffin. The oversized sample books crowd me with choices, all of them unbelievably petty but nonetheless irrevocable and symbolic in some deep, unconsidered way. Everything says something about us as a couple. Even the envelopes. “The first impression,” I am informed by the salesgirl.

Michael then tries to dissuade me from envelope lining. The one I like is a satiny alabaster. Forty-five dollars extra. I hold my ground. I feel that I have done enough, agreeing to the meat hooks. I don’t want plain envelopes. I want the white go-go boots. Everyone else has them.

Finally we agree on everything else, including the
invitation response cards. Flipping back through one of the books, we turn to a page filled with examples of pink monogrammed matchbooks that say “Patty and John, June 12, 1994.”

“It’s so New Jersey,” I say to the salesgirl.

In the instant I say this, I know that she is from New Jersey. But by then, of course, it is too late.

Michael leaves his socks on the floor when he takes off his shoes after work. This used to be fine. But now a sock on the floor isn’t just a sock on the floor. It’s a sock on the floor for the rest of my life.

At night he undresses just at the edge of his side of the bed. In the morning, he steps nimbly over the discarded pants, shorts, and crumpled belt. He is finished with them; the movement between there and the hamper would impede his speed and efficiency. Besides, they magically disappear, these dirty clothes. The enchanted fairies come and take them away.

“I’m not your mother,” I say. “I shouldn’t have to pick up after you.”

“Then don’t,” he says. “No one’s making you.”

“You are,” I shout. “You are by not doing it yourself.”

Insta-Shrew: Just add diamonds.

Michael went to the movies with Graham, something dark and independent. Afterward, they will go to Roosevelt’s Tamale Parlor.

I didn’t go to the movies with them; I told them I
felt ill. After they left, I danced a little jig by the refrigerator as I popped a beer and settled in for the evening to watch the
Daffy Marathon
on the Cartoon Network.

More and more we are both sneaking alone time. If we ever find a house, I look forward to having my own room. Maybe a wing.

It’s the constant togetherness that chafes. No matter how much you love someone, you eventually reach the point where you feel like Kathleen Turner saying to Michael Douglas, Sometimes I just want to smash your face in.

This morning I put a piñata up in my office doorway. People came by to bash it with a mailing tube.

Then out of nowhere my boss, the Creative Director from L.A., appeared. He wore a black linen shirt with a Nehru collar. Baggy pleated black pants and pointy eelskin Bruno Magli shoes. His shoes reminded me of Howard Gossage, who once asked a woman where she got her shoes sharpened. He never visits my office; his fun alarm had gone off.

He stood in the doorway, fingering his goatee. Frowning.

He said, “When did you put this up?”

“Just now,” I said. He smiled mildly, looking at the candy on the floor. Mentally considering whether to let me keep the piñata or not.

Finally, he picked up a piece of candy, looked at it, put it down, and said, “We must not be keeping you busy enough. That’s all going to change soon.”

The Creative Director from L.A. said no more. He had the power to insinuate and then move on.

I waited until everyone was at lunch, and then I took down the piñata. Swept up the candy, put it in a bowl. People in advertising will eat anything.

Had a long discussion with myself about taking another Valium, but didn’t. I have to save them for emergencies, not just humiliations.

Michael gets a phone call from his mother, Ilene, tonight, at 11 p.m., which means it’s 2 o’clock in Brooklyn. She never sleeps, Ilene. She seems, however, to know just when we are drifting off to sleep, and she telephones then.

Ilene tells Michael to wear a mask while gardening to ward against asthma and that fish are bad, all fish, not just big fish. She also is worried about mud slides. Michael explains that the Victorian we live in is built on bedrock. Ilene discusses botulism and how you can get it from fresh milk. How the elastic on your underwear rubbing against your bare skin can eventually give you skin cancer. She does all this within sixty seconds. It’s in the pivot.

Michael says, “OK,” “Yes,” “All right,” “Really?” and “OK,” and “I’ll keep that in mind.” He says all of this in the calm voice of someone who has known for a long time that he is going to die of a brain tumor.

I enjoy listening to him talk to his mother, then it’s something amusing that is happening to someone else, instead of something amusing that is happening to me, to which I have to respond. Other than her quarterly visits, I communicate with Ilene via cards and letters and the sending of Harry and David dried-fruit baskets three times a year, which is what she always asks for. She’s very nonspecific when I ask how she’s enjoyed them. I inquired about the figs once, and
she just about broke a hip changing the subject. I think she hoards the fruit baskets. I imagine her placing them all in a room somewhere in her house, a room that someday Michael is going to have to clean out, which means I could potentially be asked to help.

I can easily envision Ilene stockpiling against some coming disaster, at which time she alone will be saved because she has dried fruit.

My brother, Mark, has offered to play the piano for our ceremony. He is thirty-eight years old and doesn’t own a television or a microwave or an answering machine. If you call him, he either answers the phone in person or he isn’t there. His car has manual windows.

Mark taught himself the piano at age ten and was playing Chopin nocturnes from memory at twenty; now he teaches children and adults piano for a living in Los Gatos, just outside Santa Cruz. He’s one of the best people I know, and the only person I know who has never seen an episode of
Seinfeld.

We go over to his house to hear some selections for the procession. After hearing them all and drinking two bottles of Chilean Merlot, we choose Handel’s
Largo.

His new librarian girlfriend sits silently by on the extra chair like a big cat, her black hair fanning around her face. Her eyes casually assess my brother as he plays. I instinctively don’t trust her. I know that look. It’s the I’m Waiting to See If Someone Better Comes Along look. I half expect her to start licking her hands to groom herself, but she doesn’t. She just watches.

I want to say, I see you, bitch.

• • •

I just read the tiny, nine-point-type information sheet inside my Pill packet. Michael made me go on the Pill, is how I tell it to myself, but actually I did it to control my PMS, which it isn’t doing. I still feel like Joan Crawford on steroids. I was so gratified when Beth told me she was PMSing once and got into a fight with her mother and wanted to pull over on the freeway, push her out of the car, and back over her.

I inspected the Pill brochure to see if there was any truth to the rumor of side effects. Upon inspection, nothing proved askance but an increased risk for sterility, high blood pressure, and cancer of the breast, cervix, and liver. Oh, and blood clots that fly swiftly to your brain.

When you pass thirty-five as a woman and your hormones start raging, they should just tell you, You get to be sick, or you get to take drugs that kill you. Then they could pass out magazines to flip through until you decide.

I call my friend Ray at his law firm in Dallas, where he moved after college and never moved back. People in high school used to hate Ray because he was muscular and good-looking and first-string quarterback, but he just kept on being those things. Then Ray stopped playing football and went to Stanford with me, also majoring in English with a straight B-minus average. We were nothing there together, which was kind of nice. Nobody hates you.

Ray says he just talked to Dusty. Dusty and Ray have been friends as long as Dusty and I have been friends. I ask Ray how Dusty is doing.

“Still gay,” he says. Ray’s been married twice and has twin sons. Like mine, Ray’s father was a minister, and unlike mine, his father still practices: Episcopalian.

Ray launches into an impromptu discussion about the upcoming holidays and religion. He says, “I only went to church because I loved my dad. It meant nothing to me.”

“I believe all religion was a human creation to deal with suffering, back when everybody only lived to be twenty-three. They had to believe in something,” he says. “When I heard about the Mormons, with the crickets and shit, I couldn’t believe it.

“The Muslims are no better,” he adds.

I wait for him to tell me about the Muslims. He does.

“It’s all about some spaceship,” he says in a confused voice. “And Allah arriving on the other side of the moon, along with some guys on camels.”

There is a small pause. Ray receives an incoming business call from New York, which he summarily dismisses.

“I know it has something to do with the other side of the moon, camels, and some golden path. I mean if you just wrote up the unabridged version of that and plopped it down in front of one hundred people who’d never been introduced to any of it, they’d tell you: ‘This is a loon case. This is a cult.’

“Look at the Catholics,” he says. He’s drawling now. “All those uniforms for everybody and the pope in a pointy white hat, saying not to use condoms and how women can’t be priests.

“And there’s a
bunch
of ’em, man.”

Ray’s wife is Catholic. He tells me she has recently announced that she wants their two boys to be raised
Catholic. Which is why I guess we’re talking about all this; also because we both like to talk instead of doing what we’re supposed to be doing, which is operating our wheelbarrows in hell. He continues, in his summation voice.

“I just want to say to all of these religions, What are you
talking
about? Just give me a shred of evidence.