Wedding Cake for Breakfast (8 page)

It was such a success that for many years, until my in-laws moved away, we continued to alternate holidays among all of our homes. Everyone pitched in to cook and clean up, wine flowed freely, and we even started some new traditions, like buying inexpensive joke gifts to throw in a grab bag. And every Christmas morning, Glenn and I took some time just for the two of us, for our own little family, before heading out for the day.

Now Glenn and I have three kids of our own. Our house is messier than Glenn would like it, and cleaner than I need it to be. That's probably the thing we squabble about most. My mother is enormously helpful with my kids, and having her and my father around frequently is one of the biggest blessings in my life—despite the fact that she sneaks them to McDonald's and lets them stay up too late. But we don't fight about it. In fact, we haven't exchanged harsh words in years; my mother has become one of my closest friends. We talk almost every day, and I'm often the one who reaches for the phone to dial her.

When I think back to the shattered picture frame in Glenn's spotless basement, I realize it was a sign, a kind of merging of our two styles. Of our two families, and, first and foremost, of ourselves.

Marriage Changes Things

LIZA MONROY

“WHO TAUGHT YOU HOW TO WASH DISHES?” Emir's voice boomed from the kitchen.

We had barely taken the “Just Married” sign off the back of his rusty blue Sentra, and I was sitting on the black futon in the living room of our West Hollywood apartment, job-hunting online while a
Golden Girls
rerun played in the background. A golf-ball-size lump rose in my throat. In the kitchen, Emir stood over the sink, putting the dish rack's contents back in and drenching the dishes in green liquid soap.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

He handed me the offending plate. A faint trace of Parmesan clung to the edge. I scratched it away. Sponge poised, he reached for another dish.

“It's just this one,” I insisted. “These others are fine.”

“Look at this place!” he shouted, scrubbing vigorously. “I clean the countertops until they sparkle and you leave coffee-cup rings. My clothes are hanging, yours collect in those horrible little piles on the bathroom floor.”

He was right, but I balked and called him OCD. It was an attempt to deny, to myself as much as to Emir, the shame I felt over my seeming inability to distinguish cleanliness from mess. Still, he had seen my rooms since we lived in college dorms. He knew I was no Martha Stewart. Why was it different now that we were married? Sometime after the night we vowed to walk each other's hound dogs and polish each other's blue suede shoes in an Elvis-led ceremony in Las Vegas, something had shifted between us. We were too broke to take a honeymoon, and our “honeymoon period” was not exactly shaping up to be a state of bliss.

I had expected nothing to change. But here we were, an unconventional twosome who suddenly found ourselves filling the most conventional of roles. Marriage, I thought, was not supposed to do this—not to us—but as it turns out, marriage changes things no matter what kind of couple you are.

Also, we were very young. I had turned twenty-two five days before our wedding in November of 2001. Emir was eight months older. Our meet-cute story began when he sat down across from me in class back when we were film majors in Boston. We were paired on a project, and coffees, brunches, dancing, and first sleepovers ensued. On paper, our marriage looked no different from a more “traditional” one. All we had to do, come the day we interviewed with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the INS), was prove that we loved each other, which would be easy because it was true. As for whether ours was a “real” marriage, if we two consenting adults agreed it was, then wasn't it? Noticing the way we started acting after we tied the knot was what convinced me.

What made us different was that Emir was gay and I knew it when I married him. We were not physically intimate and neither of us wanted to be. We married because he was going to have to leave the country after his student visa ran out. I did not have many friends who knew and understood me the way Emir did. He was my best friend. I didn't want to be without him, and I certainly didn't want to be alone.

The real stakes were for Emir, who came from a gay-intolerant Muslim homeland. (In order to protect his family and identity, it's a place I call Emirstan.) He was determined to find a way to make a postcollege life in the United States. In Emirstan, hate crimes against gay people were no cause for outrage. Shortly after 9/11, new prejudice against young Middle Eastern men plus a difficult economy made finding work (which would earn him a visa) difficult for Emir. I understood his predicament. I grew up with my mother, who worked in the Foreign Service in visa sections of embassies abroad. I knew enough about immigration to realize he would likely have to leave the country if I didn't intervene.

So I asked him to marry me. (I didn't tell my mother. For three years she thought he was my “nice gay roommate.”)

Emir and I loved each other and offered each other everything except our bodies. At first, he worried our marriage was illegal, but he came around after I made my case for our union. Was an infertile couple barred from the institution of marriage? Couples who did not want children? What about a celibate couple who enjoyed each other's company but shared distaste for physical intimacy? What about open marriages, where both partners agreed not to be sexually exclusive? When it came to marriage, it seemed the rule was there were no rules anymore.

People have been arrested for green-card marriages, but no one like us—not a close pair who moved in together and shared their lives as we did. We sang along with J.Lo on road trips, watched
Sex and the City
marathons, went out dancing and for long lazy lunches at the Abbey, our favorite West Hollywood gay bar. We talked late into the night while playing our endless backgammon tournament and drinking white wine. We even had the same career dream: to someday work as screenwriters.

What if,
I wondered,
after Emir and I become successful and move into a Hollywood Hills villa, we adopt an entourage of international, multiethnic children and live as progressive-minded citizens of the world? What negative consequences, other than annoying our old college friends, could there be?

Given our circumstances, I anticipated being married would be no different from an endless sleepover with my best friend. The terms of our union were straightforward: we would share an apartment (two bedrooms), a bank account (I'd still have my own, separately, for personal expenses), and our love of bigger, burly men. (Emir and I, small, dark, and petite, look alike, and are both attracted to our physical opposites.)

And so we swung our hips to “All Shook Up” at the Viva Las Vegas Chapel. I thought things between us would be carefree and easy, just like always.

• • • • • • • •

Emir and I agreed to move to New York City in mid-December, for a fresh start as newlyweds. I planned to keep my car to use for road trips or if we ever needed a quick escape. Emir didn't want to drive to New York—motel sheets and rest-stop toilets repelled him. He wanted to fly. We settled on a compromise. I would drive, arrive first, and apartment hunt. Emir would remain behind, sell furniture and his car, then fly out and join me.

The plan was straightforward; the route, winding. I visited the Grand Canyon and Sedona in Arizona, White Sands and a town called Truth or Consequences in New Mexico. I felt like I was on the lam. I wondered what I was trying to escape from and hoped it wasn't my nascent marriage.

The more I drove, the more uncertain I became.

In the parking lot of a strip mall in El Paso, I was suddenly paralyzed with fear. The unfamiliarity of my surroundings highlighted the circumstances of my life, and I was scared. Everything had become strange. I was married, but I was also young and unemployed, and by the time I got to New York, I'd be broke. (Still seeing myself as totally independent, I wouldn't accept help from Emir even though his father had offered to help us out financially.) What was I doing? I felt claustrophobic in the marriage and agoraphobic on the road. Mostly, I was just overwhelmed and didn't know how to deal. So I turned around. Thinking only of getting back to Los Angeles as quickly as possible, I made a huge life decision for us both. Marriage and moving are two of life's most stressful changes, and it was all too much at once. I had moved emotional confusion into literal territory.

I had to get back, and fast.

That I was returning to L.A. was going to upset Emir more than any scrap of cheese on a plate, so I planned out my own punishment while I was still on the road: I would move out of our L.A. apartment before he could kick me out. Back in a Sedona motel room, I perused the Los Angeles Craigslist and found a room for rent listed by a guy I had met in a diner once.
Aren't you Cameron from that night at Fred 62's?
I wrote.
What a coincidence,
he replied. The room was mine if I wanted it.

“What happened?” Emir asked when he opened the apartment door.

I could give a million excuses but not one good reason. My stomach was lodged somewhere in my throat. The sky was clear, dotted with stars behind the streetlamps.

We walked down the street to Whole Foods on Santa Monica Boulevard and made our way to the salad bar. Light pop music drowned out the silence between us. We paid at separate registers and went outside to the picnic bench overlooking the parking lot. The concrete glistened in the moonlight as if implanted with diamonds—there, but not for the taking. Neither of us touched our food.

“Couldn't you have thought about it more?” he asked. “How could you not know you didn't want to go to New York until you were halfway through Texas?”

“El Paso isn't halfway through Texas.”

“What is this,
Thelma & Louise
?”

He buried his hands in his curly black hair.

“Yes; yes, it kind of is like
Thelma & Louise.
That's exactly what it's like.”

“There's no way out? You're cornered and have to drive off a cliff?”

“You're better off without me around messing things up for you,” I said. “I found a room in Los Feliz. I'll be out of your way.”

“Are you kidding?”

“We'll still be married. My mail will come here, we'll do everything right. I'm not going to back out of my promise. I love you.”

I wasn't thinking straight. I needed space to reflect. Ultimately, though, my fear of rejection, that Emir didn't love me anymore after I proved myself so impulsive and unreliable, preempted my leaving. Ashamed of my own inability to commit to anything, even a city in which to live, I felt adrift. The marriage was the one thing that was supposed to make me feel anchored, yet I'd run from that, too. How could I focus on keeping Emir with me when I was barely keeping it together? Why I was moving into a stranger's house instead baffled even me, but now I suppose that given my capriciousness, split-decision making, and propensity to act on whims, I feared it was impossible for Emir to trust me again. I was leaving precisely because I loved him and wanted him to be happy. I still wanted to be married. I still wanted to help him. As long as we had the same mailing address, filed taxes jointly, could answer personal questions about each other, and had both our names on a bank account, he didn't actually need me around.

“You don't have to do this,” Emir said. Yes, my return had been unexpected and I'd changed the course of our lives without consulting him, but we could talk through it, come up with a new plan, save money, and move to New York down the line. He wasn't going to kick me out; I was being crazy. Still, I moved into Cameron's with the two suitcases still packed in my trunk from the road trip. Only two months into married life, Emir and I were separated.

• • • • • • • •

My decision felt wrong from the moment I dragged my suitcases across the foyer of my room in my new random roommate's house. Emir and I were comfortable with each other even when we disagreed; at Cameron's I hid in my room, feeling too awkward and shy to even start a conversation, not daring to go into the kitchen if he was in there.

Fortuitously, within a week, Cameron announced he had reunited with his girlfriend. He was very sorry to have to ask me to leave, he said, but she was moving back in. The breakup had been the reason he wanted a roommate. Was there somewhere else I could go? Because he needed me out in the next twenty-four hours.

“Honey,” I said when Emir answered the phone, “I need to come home.”

• • • • • • • •

Emir arrived, if not exactly with open arms, at least with a wry half smile. They'd just put up the Christmas decorations, tinsel in Tinseltown. One-dimensional gold bells and shiny green wreaths decked out the boulevard. At Cameron's, Emir helped his wayward wife pack yet again. He zipped my suitcases and we returned home, the separation over, both of us relieved.

In the weeks that followed, though, Emir went out on boys' night without inviting me. Before we were married, I was always invited on boys' night. “I need some space,” he echoed. Well, the INS was definitely going to give our marriage the seal of approval now, I thought. We bickered, we weren't having sex, and we picked on each other over towels left on the bathroom floor (mine) and his late nights out partying while I sat on the couch alone playing on the Internet. We struggled to find our equilibrium. Could things ever go back to “normal”? Couldn't we still go out for flirtinis at the Abbey or curl up on the couch with tissues and popcorn for rom-com night? Had negotiating the intricacies of the merging of our lives actually ruined our once-easy relationship?

• • • • • • • •

I found a job at a Beverly Hills talent agency where I filed head shots and sorted mail. Emir stayed up until five in the morning playing the Sims and slept in late. Before, I would hardly have noticed, but resentment slowly built. Five months into marriage, he still wasn't working and I grew weary. What if, now that needing a job in order to stay in the country was off the table, it turned out he didn't want a job? Marriage, I was surprised to find, had also heightened my expectations of what both of us would accomplish. I felt deeply invested in Emir, as if our identities had merged.

He continued going out almost every night and I was jealous. And when I came home from work to find him playing the Sims instead of looking for jobs, I lost it.

“I did this for you!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

I slammed the door and didn't emerge for several hours, leaving his quiet raps unanswered. When I eventually did, I took a hoodie I'd hung over the back of a chair, put it on, and zipped it up to the neck. The room was too cold. Emir kept the air-conditioning going full blast.

“I may not wash dishes the right way,” I said, “but why don't you stay home some nights and hang out with me? Or turn the air conditioner off sometimes?”

“Why didn't you say so? Why did you wait until it bothered you so much?”