Otherwise Engaged (7 page)

“I mean, all we know for sure is, you go into the ground and worms eat you.”

Right after I talk to Ray, I call Dusty. I can hear his television on in the background. I tell him I’m flirting with the idea of Judaism, after Michael and I are married.

Dusty says that nobody’s doing Judaism anymore, that the new thing in New York is Buddhism, which he says is much more circa 2010.

“Christians were the eighties, Jews were the nineties, and now it’s Buddhism.”

I tell him about Ray’s wife wanting their sons to be raised Catholic.

He sighs like he has just seen a hurt puppy.

“Catholicism is so sad. Very fifties.”

He further informs me that Mormonism is the religion of repressed homosexuality … thus the polygamy. In a high falsetto, he says, “I
can’t
be gay—just ask my wives!”

Dusty thinks that Paul Newman is gay, and Tom Cruise and John Travolta and Al Gore. Also Mister Rogers and the original Captain Kangaroo.

Then he says, “I have to go now. They’re doing
Big Bold Gold
on QVC, and they don’t do that very often.”

• • •

Last night an argument. They come out of nowhere, like tornadoes.

Michael yelled, I cried. I took the ring off, which is my big move now. I don’t just take it off; I take it off, put it in its box, and hand it back to him.

He put it in his pocket and went to the Lucky Penny twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Geary and ate a patty melt.

“Patty melts are good when you’re mad,” he said to me this morning. It was all he said. But he did hand the ring box back.

After he went to work, I looked inside the box to make sure the ring was there. Then I slipped it onto my third finger and called my best friend, Lana, in Albuquerque. Lana and I met in homeroom in seventh grade; we’ve known each other twenty-four years. Lana looks like Linda Hamilton and can crack every bone in her body.

“It was about chicken broth,” I say. “We were out of chicken broth.”

I hear her nod, from the teacher’s lunchroom at the high school where she teaches drama. In the middle of my story she stops me and says, “Hold on …

“What’s going on?”
she screams at her students down the hall. I hear her suede-booted footsteps going toward them. I hear them scatter. In a minute she comes back to the phone and says in a normal voice, “Go ahead.”

I tell Lana everything, which feels great because, for most people, I edit. Most people are definitely getting along on the Cliffs Notes.

It started when I was making a recipe, from Susan Powter’s cookbook, I told her. I started cooking and discovered that we were out of garlic.

I went into the living room and announced this to
Michael, who was flopped out on the couch, watching the news. He snapped off the television, put on his coat, and walked to the corner store to buy garlic, with the air of a man about to donate bone marrow. He came home and threw the garlic down the hall, onto the kitchen table. Then he went back to the couch.

It goes without saying that I was never out of fresh garlic when I lived alone.

I got to the end of the recipe and went into the living room and said, “Guess what, we’re out of chicken broth.” He stood up and placed one fist on his hip, like the letter
P
.

“You should have read ahead in the recipe,” he accused.

At that point, I did what I had to do: I implicated him in the missing broth. I said that last time I looked, we had plenty of broth. He must have used it up, I said, and not told anyone.

We both commenced shouting at the same time. It seemed we were no longer discussing chicken broth, but who was going to get the final space in the lifeboat.

I kept saying, “Listen, it’s no big deal, I just need some CHICKEN BROTH.”

Then Michael went to the Lucky Penny and had a patty melt. I put everything away in the refrigerator and had a bowl of Grape Nuts.

When I tell Lana all of this, she describes how she and Raul fight over who is going to change Isabel’s diaper, how he claims the baby doesn’t need to be changed when her diaper is hanging to her ankles, stuffed. When her turds are literally skittering across the floor.

“They’re that way,” Lana says, brightly. Then she whispers in a demonic hush, “Spoiled.”

This makes me feel better, more normal. Yet I suspect
deep down that it is not all his fault. Mama’s making the Shake ’n Bake, but I’m helping somehow.

One thing I know for certain, this is not about chicken broth. When I think of finding out what it is about, I want to weep with fatigue.

After my session with Reuben I bought six cans of chicken broth and three large heads of garlic. I know it’s not that simple, but it feels good.

Reuben says he wishes everyone who gets married to have a good fighting marriage. He himself has a good fighting marriage, to another psychoanalyst whose name is Sheila. It’s possible for me to believe in good, fighting marriages and also be very glad that he and his wife don’t live upstairs. I think once you’ve heard your therapist shrieking over who ate the last banana, you’re finished.

Michael’s mother, Ilene, called last night, and I answered the phone, thinking it was Michael. Busted.

Ilene told me that women have to act like the man is smarter, even though he’s not, and they have to act like the man is stronger, even though he’s not.

She said I have to be nice to Michael, and patient. So he’s told her about the arguments.

“You have to be nice to Michael.” She said, “It’s your job, as his wife.” Ilene is not one to mince words. She doesn’t mind conflict; it makes her feel more alive.

“I’m not his wife yet,” I said. She ignores this. Like a tank, she is able to barrel over ground most lesser vehicles are slowed by.

“You have to make him happy, as a man.”

I took a cleansing breath. Finally I said, “Yes, but it’s hard making someone happy three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”

“Well, you have to,” she said. “Other
wise
 …” Her voice trails off to indicate a terrible conclusion, which is understood to be unspeakable.

Then she was off, in a puff of orange smoke.

We’re flying to Taos, for Lana’s wedding to Raul.

Lana and I got engaged within two weeks of each other, this last fall. Both of us to men who’ve been divorced and have one child. Somehow without exactly planning it, we do everything together; except she and Raul had Isabel a year before they got engaged. We’ve been friends longer than we’ve been people; she’s the sister I never had. She is the jackpot sibling.

Lana got engaged first. That’s what triggered the ultimatum I gave to Michael over coffee. Lana and I had both been waiting for a long time, and then when she got hers, I wanted mine. Commitment-wise, things between Michael and me instantly went from Unresolved to Fucking Unacceptable.

When it happened, she called me before she even called her mother. I hung up the phone with her by pressing my finger on the flash button, and then I released the flash button and speed-dialed Michael at his office to relay the news.

“Raul just asked Lana to marry him.”

That’s all I said. But as everyone knows, it’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.

Now Michael’s right here next to me, eating dry-roasted peanuts, engaged to be married. Finished, in other words. Off the shelf. Whenever we hit turbulence, he holds my hand and squeezes. Not as if he is afraid, but as if he is just checking to see if I’m ripe.

It is tempting to believe that everything is going according to plan.

Lana’s wedding was lovely; they lit luminarias and we looked out over the Taos valley, which was covered in snow. Her mother, Eleanor, gave her away, alone. A small altar held Lana’s father’s photograph in a silver frame, one where he is entertaining his grandchildren with jokes, his face white with cancer.

“Who gives this woman into this marriage?”

“Her father and I,” Eleanor said.

Her voice broke only a little. She is brave, so we all pretended to be.

Isabel, their one-year-old, padded uncertainly down the aisle in tiny white slippers festooned with baby roses, chewing up the scenery. It seemed then as though that was the only good way, the sensible way. To have your baby and then get married.

Now that it’s all over I worry that Raul isn’t tall enough for Lana.

We used to make elaborate sundaes and name them after ourselves, with Frosted Flakes, raisins, coffee ice cream, and chocolate syrup. We went to school together every day on the same bus, which we constantly missed. She lived on my street, only down the block a little. If she walked in with
John F. Kennedy Jr., I would find something to criticize. I’m that fucked up.

Back at work, sitting in my office, staring at Coit Tower. I am waiting for them to come for me: the account team. The men and women in Banana Republic suits and Ann Taylor outfits.

It’s not paranoia. They will come for us, for Graham and me. We have just sold a television campaign, and we have only minutes of cool freedom left. The wheels have been set into motion; the onerous wheel of production turns. Hands reach out for us, the hands of middle management, the people who stop exciting things from happening. They will swoop, confident in their soft black cashmere V-neck sweaters. Creeping up to my office with good reasons to change the copy, mincing on thin-soled Italian shoes, like assassins. Their eyeglasses and shoes are always Italian. They work under the principle that if they can accessorize European, they can
be
European.

They point toward the storyboards with their best church faces. They know what the client wants. They know that in advance, possessing great psychic powers which they choose to use exclusively in the advertising community. They will come and decree that revisions are vital, large and sweeping triple bypass revisions. If Graham and I pretend they are not there, they retaliate. They want to be part of the process, so they run back to their offices and their computers and they produce something terrible. It is called electronic mail. “E-mail” to those more advanced.

In these electronic missives, the People Who Stop Exciting Things From Happening are able to write things they
are afraid to say to your face—like, Oh we’ve moved the airdates up six weeks. We’ve added outdoor, two retail donuts, and a radio campaign to the overall mix. We’ve promised the client they can absolutely be on for their mother’s birthday.

E-mails arrive hourly, like death threats. Paper-free memos fan across the agency in a gay electronic confetti of idiocy.

We told the client we had the power to turn back time.

This morning, the traffic manager blindsides me in the elevator. She is feral. If I squint just a little, she is a starved wolverine. She snarls and frets and talks about how we need final three-quarter-inch tape by the first. I am afraid and want to kill her with a stick. In a far-off corner of my mind I know I am in no real danger. In the animal kingdom I am superior, and she cannot hurt me. Her goal is to make me care about deadlines. Deadlines that the account people have created, absurd and garishly impossible Mad Hatter deadlines, deadlines that the account people have promised to the client.

And now they all converge in the halls about us; I can feel them. The wolverine, the producers, the account people with their traveling psychic fair, and the people from media. They are all oozing concern, manufacturing it constantly, in relentless shifts. They are ambulatory concern factories.

We made a bad mistake, Graham and I. We wrote a campaign that people understood. They will make sure that it is produced, now, to their exact specifications. And when it’s all over, if it is successful, the Creative Director from L.A. will take full credit for it. If it fails, he will distance himself from it.

It is a shameful occupation. We do it for the money.

More e-mails arrive on black poison-tipped arrows of circuitry. I hear the sound of them arriving, the gay little beep-beep that means the end of repose, of invisibility. I dare not open them all, yet the mailbox icon on my screen will blink like the timer on a hydrogen bomb until I do open them all. One by one.

It seems the media department has airdates for the campaign all arranged. They have Time bought. Now that Time has been bought and paid for, something must be placed into the Time. They will not go away until that Time is filled with an advertisement. Now that I grasp their terrible vision of the campaign, I am of course horrified that we ever thought of it in the first place. But it must be produced. Time has been bought. They will not consider thirty seconds of silent prayer to be a refreshing change of pace. My suggestion to have a homeless man recite
Desiderata
will not be considered.

I wonder why I needed to get here in the first place. Something about wanting to write something, anything, for a living. Something about being a
creative
, whatever that is. It all seems far, now that I’m in the forest of it. Now that I’m here, now that I see the trees themselves, I don’t know if I like the trees. They seem sinister.

Life says, Tough shit. Those are your trees.

I stare at Coit Tower a little harder, milking it for all it is worth.

Michael says that the unadvertised eighth law to spiritual success is
Avoid confrontations within your own mind.

“Consciousness is a burden,” he says, imitating Deepak Chopra perfectly.

“If you think of your mind as a seething serpent, why would you walk toward it?”

It’s 3 a.m. A man just went down the street, past our flat and toward the housing projects, pinwheeling his arms and shouting, “If I see Jesus, I SOCK his ass.”

Christmas. Michael drove me to Point Bonita on his motorcycle, nestled in the Marin headlands, past the point where tourists dare to tread. An immaculate view of the Golden Gate Bridge, with wooden benches and sturdy BBQ grills. He was wearing the new Aerostitch motorcycle suit I gave him, which has black ballistic patches and counterintuitive zippers, and which cost seven hundred dollars.

“We could roast weenies,” he said, demonstrating the hinged posts the grills rest on, which can turn against the wind and shield themselves. “We could bring some Polish sausages,” he said, “and split open buns and toast them.”