I stomped my feet and checked my watch. I dug my hands into my pockets and rolled the ring box back and forth, losing it each time for a quick second in the fumble of fingertips, grabbing onto the loose thing to make sure it was still there before starting again in the other direction. Cold hands, warm heart. Cold feet, bad shoes. Someone was walking down the stairs: not Cait. A short man in a duster and long scarf. He smiled at me. I thought, He is dressed better than I am. We wished each other a happy new year. I turned and watched him disappear up the next overpass, past the water and gone forever from my life. Our life, yes? Had Chicago’s skyline always looked so lonely up close, the dark shrub of shorter, closer buildings near the water, the old Sun-Times a wall of patchwork window lights, even the Hancock rimmed in green and red windows for Christmas? And what was the name now of the Sears Tower, blinking its ridiculous antennae at planes and ships? Green: No. Red: Yes. I watched the overpass for some sign of Cait. I checked the time on my phone. A friend had said once that thousands of workers drowned to channel the Chicago River. They floated up and swam to whoever stood in the water, turning their faces toward the moon when the moon was full of light. I listened for their song. I could hear the water, Yes, the cars and cabs passing on the avenue, Yes. My shoes scraping the black ice as I bounced on my heels. Yes!
Yes, of course Cait would say Yes. Hadn’t I felt it before, the intoxicating certainty, the waiting and waiting and waiting for Yes, with all the unreason that made the feeling so vital? Could one Yes ever follow another Yes? What ended that ever definitively began with Yes? The certainty of feeling seemed the only feeling, so powerful I had to chase after it and reassure myself, over and over. Yes. Yes, we both wanted it. Yes, the spell. Yes, this easy leaning into each other in the cold air, huddling our warmth, holding out the ring she had picked weeks earlier with her cousin, the ring on her finger now, our strange urgency to get on with this smallest prelude to a life we meant to make together, this urgent and beautiful beginning of a life we were poised to claim in my midwestern city and take back west. Yes, and Yes, and Yes, I had arranged the whole visit. Yes, the best sort of question because I already knew the answer, Yes. I had only to say what I wanted and then ask for it. Yes. Cait was waiting to say Yes.
I had mumbled Yes to myself and family and friends and even the haircut guy. I had walked through my day, taking their confidence as divination itself, that the rest of the world waited to hear the news, full of approval, eager for Yes. I was positively beaming with Yes. I was radiating Yes. I felt it buzz my arms and chest. No, my pocket was buzzing with my sister’s text message: “Yes, she’s on her way.” Cait was stepping out of the cab now, holding my hand-drawn map up to the light. She was turning down the stairs to find me. Here comes Yes. It can only be her, it can only be Yes. Even Yes, years later, I remember most clearly how, Yes, my chest burned as my heart beat nearly through it, the blood fast in my fingertips and ears, my whole body suddenly too hot under scarf, sweater, coat, and hat. I was having a stroke. No, I could see her, finally: Yes.
I tried to get down on one knee, but Cait pulled me upright. The wool on my leg scraped the bench and held together. She said we should sit together a while before we said anything after Yes, which we did, and we cried a little together, because it was so strange and unlike anything I had ever imagined a Yes would be. Were we celebrating now? I took out the box and put it on her lap. She opened the box, slid the ring onto her finger, and we leaned across each other like two old friends at a funeral, repeating our prayer: yes, yes, yes, yes. We called friends. We turned off our phones and watched the city. We walked back up the stairs, along the bridge, and into Chicago, even brighter up close, away from the moon and its impossible water, Yes and Yes, the perfect grid of streets and city lights that seemed to follow our spotlight across a stage, the perfect choreography, fast and slow, until there we were, Yes, together in my old city, walking quickly to keep warm on the other side of a life, done finally with our beginning, crossing from Yes to Yes.
Signal and Noise
The Chicago doc’s office closed a long hallway: two separate rooms combined decades earlier by taking down the wall between them. We talked every Friday by phone, though I only visited the office in person a dozen or so times. Even after he semiretired, moving into his home office a few blocks away, I still pictured him holding his phone on the worn sofa beside the books stacked on books, under his posters of Matisse, Van Gogh, various traveling exhibitions to the Art Institute, the famous statues that I recognized but that never came to mind except while I was waiting on the deeper sofa opposite him, ordering mentally the things I meant to talk about, trying to remember the names of his children and the places he went for vacation, while he finished making our tea. It was a nice touch, that tea. There was a silence in the room as we waited for the water to boil. Always, I stood in the hallway before a session deciding how I would start the conversation and what I should talk about next. Always, mug in hand, that anxiety slowed to a deep color of two or three important ideas, which came to seem less urgent than what I had imagined all week, as though so many years and chats now acted on the mind as a great distillery, concentrating the essences, wafting away other, lesser frustrations. The morning after I proposed to Cait, flush with well wishes, a different kind of distillation was already beginning. The Indiana nieces were reporting via text messages discord in Katie’s family. With each rattling in my pocket and bright flash of the screen came the portent of still more calamity, reported as faint praise, surrounded on all sides by terrifying implications of guilt and widowhood.
“Why,” the Chicago doc asked, “does it matter how anyone besides Cait or you feels about your decision to remarry?”
“It has to matter,” I said. “For starters, I can’t get any signal from all that noise.”
We often started with this metaphor. Signal and noise. What were other people saying, and what did they really mean? What did I need to listen for and what could I ignore?
I said it was like listening to Wilco, Revolver, Pet Sounds. Drums and bass distorted through one speaker. Melodies and guitars cleanly out the other. Katie’s family, hurt, and mine, well, thrilled. A third speaker: Cait’s family, thrilled too. And every time I picked a speaker to listen to, I felt like I was betraying someone. I kept working the analogy, even as it fell apart. I knew the various solos by heart. I couldn’t hear the whole song.
I shifted gears. I told the Chicago doc about my elaborate marriage proposal, Cait traveling from one Chicago landmark to the next, meeting my family and closest friends. How we took the early bus from Indiana, where my nieces had handed Cait the first clue and said their good-byes. It had mattered to me a great deal that they meet and like Cait before we got engaged; I wondered what I would have done if they hadn’t all so quickly taken to each other. Arriving in Chicago, Cait met Sheila at the bus station. They raced off together for coffee and carrot cake in Andersonville. Then Cait took the bus to meet Jeff at Wrigley Field. She walked with Dave and Meghan out to the park with the statues from the Wizard of Oz, where I had first called Cait to suggest our cross-country trip. All day, phone calls from friends in California clued Cait in to still another favorite spot or city standout, ending finally at the Art Institute lions, where my sister and her fiancé pointed Cait toward the balustrade. I had planned the day for months. I knew she would say yes. It was so corny and perfect. Even that morning, our phones had lit up with more good wishes and good cheer, the eager congratulations of people I didn’t know, who admired my good taste and fortune.
“How,” I asked the Chicago doc, “was the focus of this story my worry about Katie’s family?”
That night, falling asleep, it had seemed possible that I might wake suddenly from a dream; that my life with Katie or in Indiana waited for me still on the other side of waking. And when I woke instead in Chicago, and saw the gray buildings through the window, the neon decorations down the block flickering off, I laid very still for a moment. What if Cait was not there?
What if I had returned to Chicago without her? I wanted to remember the dream: something about California, happiness. And when I instead rolled across sleep and into Cait’s body, I tried to enjoy all of it, to be happy and entirely of one life. I wanted that life to hold its shape long enough to seem certain, to sleep and wake and see the room again, find Cait and pull her close, and then doze for another hour or two, listening to the city begin its daily routines, filling with other lives continuing around this one.
What was I asking the Chicago doc to do if not to offer some strategy to keep the lives distinct?
The Chicago doc opened his eyes. How was he always so calm?
“So,” he said, taking a sip of his tea, “what does it matter how anyone else besides you or Cait feels about your decision to remarry?”
*
“The Marriagers,” Cait’s niece declared us. On our postcard wedding announcement, she pushed us in a shopping cart across a Costco parking lot. “We’re Off the Market!” A few weeks later, we aimed scanners at price tags. We listed everyone we wanted to see at the wedding, and we invited all of them. In his chambers, over lunch, Cait’s second cousin agreed to marry us. He was a widower too. I wanted to ask him whether there was something I should know about remarrying, as a widower, but he only offered advice to both of us. Spiritual counseling. Pastel worksheets to understand how we’d fight. At night, online, we picked colors for dresses. We ordered ties for groomsmen. I bought a new blazer. Cait picked a dress from the family stockpile of beautiful wedding dresses in the basement of her family home, some five or six decades old, from grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters. We drove as a family from the hotel where I made a toast with my groomsmen. Thanks to Katie. Blessings for the future.
In wedding photographs, the last of our youth hardens at the edges into modest early middle age. Handsome and confident, angular rather than round, we glow, beam, preen, lean. Our eager progression will never turn us back toward youth, but we feel young, so impossibly youthful and earnest and proud to love each other under the great apple tree, beside the aviary, and walking through the terraced gardens. Our wedding, the eleventh and last family wedding held in the backyard of Cait’s family home, is a family affair. Five aunts, thirteen cousins, six siblings, ten nieces and nephews, and four parents do their part to make the day. Cait’s mom plants new flowers everywhere and digs up the dying trees. She lays runners to decorate the fountain and to warn partygoers wandering the paths not to fall into the goldfish pond. All evening, our guests circle the gardens, under paper lanterns strung in the trees, between glass bulbs stuck high in the branches. My new brother-in-law climbs a stepladder to place the lanterns where they will shine out and over tables stacked with homemade cakes, candy, old china and silver platters, the bright salads dressed with wildflowers and herbs, shining up as the night comes on and fills the trees with their color. Cait’s sister bakes nine cakes, the last, at my request, a Cubs cake. The other sister caters, with her friends, the dinner. “Welcome to the Borg,” an uncle says the day before the wedding, as he climbs the stairs with a box of family photographs. Cait’s grandfather, ninety-nine that August, is just awake from his afternoon nap. Before he rides his stationary bicycle, answers his daily mail, and heads down to the basement workshop to fix a chair, he wants to see the tie he wore to the last wedding.
*
We invited Katie’s family to the wedding. We ate lunch together at the hotel. Cait’s aunts sat with them at the rehearsal, and again during the wedding ceremony, as Katie’s nieces played the welcome music and walked in the procession as flower girls. When Dave lit a candle and read a poem in Katie’s memory, I tried to make eye contact with Katie’s mom, but she was looking at her program. That evening, at the reception, a student walked up from campus and crashed the wedding. He was wearing soccer shorts and a Yankees hat. He insisted on taking a photo with the newlyweds. Until he walked off with a bottle of wine, I thought, Surely, he belongs to someone at this wedding. What harm had he really done?
Months later, the story of the crasher was an irreverent anecdote, a story we told about the wedding that said, “The more the merrier. We make a place for everyone.” When I danced with Katie’s mom, I smiled for our affection. She smiled back. I was so happy that she was there. But perhaps my happiness, up close, had some tint to it that did not resemble the old happiness. Or, there was an excitement to it that gleamed like ambition. Perhaps when she saw it, when all of Katie’s family saw it, clearly and without hesitation, they felt separate of such happiness, foolish even. How patronizing: my brio, my gladly and loudly welcoming and wanting to include them. They did not want to only feel welcome. I married Cait and saw a bright, following future. They watched the wedding and they did not see the past. Or, they looked for the past and saw only my reverence for it, and felt bittersweet for such a mix of feelings. That we had danced together at Katie’s wedding. That I had then known how to make their place at a wedding and now didn’t.
That night, Katie’s mom had hugged Cait’s mom and said, “He doesn’t need two mothers-in-law.” While she did it, I danced in the garden with Ed and Katie’s niece, though after a few more songs, we all left. Cait’s sister drove us in the family Valiant to a nearby hotel, where friends had decorated the room with plastic and candy hearts. They had left two plates of cold dinner, which we ate in near silence, ravenous and exhausted, before sleeping a few hours. We woke early to catch our honeymoon flight.
*
We found Lost Cities in a vintage gaming shop in the Sunset, on one of our city walkabouts. Lost Cities sold well, the owner explained, but it was not popular on the order of Life or Monopoly. Its niche was traditionalist gamers who knew and loved board games. The play was simple. Each color represented an expedition—white Himalaya, blue Antiquity, etc.—to remote or ancient places. The board held every expedition. There were two ways to play. The first was to simply beat the other person. Highest points won. The other way to play was to collaborate. Tacitly, each player might agree that his or her goals were mutual and exclusive. Playing to take away points made no sense. This version of the game was governed by luck of the draw. The difference in point totals was very small. Still, each player might score the near-maximum number of points. Like a basketball game played without defense, or a ballet consisting entirely of solos, there would be no tension, no adjusting and pushing back as the play continued. But wasn’t that a nice way to work together, trusting the other person not to screw you and playing all the while for a personal best?
That strategy was no fun for me. I couldn’t help competing. I wanted to look for mischief and misdirection. Was it a trap when Cait set out two or three handshakes of different colors? Did she hold points in those colors, or was she tricking me, distracting my attention from her endgame? After playing together all fall, I had developed the habits of a defensive and self-conscious investor, cutting my losses early, holding out irrational hope for some market weather that would revive my crops and turn everything, in the end, bright green. It rarely happened. I lost. Worse, I took losing personally. The cards were against me. My developments were unfairly stalled. Cait’s straightforward play did not resist my scheming. Like water over a stone, she simply played across and through. I saw where the game might go, but so long as she did not overreach. There were no odds for me to bluff. I was playing against myself.
Day by day, we lost some of the evening light in the kitchen. We closed the windows as smaller throngs headed into the Mission or across the street to Dolores Park. A neighbor had planted a mock citrus down the block, and all the commotion seemed only to stir lemons and oranges across our room. On Wednesdays, our upstairs neighbors came downstairs to watch Lost. We made elaborate desserts to fete the last episodes. We enjoyed our truncated city life: high and pop culture, natural and urban spaces, organic meats and local produce, handmade jams with bread from the bakery across the street, and chocolates and ice creams at six or seven bucks a pop. Returning home, we took out Lost Cities. We opened the
windows and listened to KFOG as the day wound down. We tallied the score, closed up the game, scrubbed down the kitchen, and set out everything to dry. Then, we climbed into bed, under our heavy comforter, with the cats on either side of us and the city below shining its lights up at the ceiling, as every few hours, an ambulance or fire truck ran across the emergency lane, which became at night, again, coincident with the sirens, the fastest way across our city.
*
On Katie’s birthday, the second since her death, I had no clear sense of how to keep the day. I should invent my own rituals, the Chicago doc again suggested, and keep to them every year. But it didn’t feel reverent to keep Katie’s memory by myself. And what place exactly was I keeping for her in this newly remarried life? On her birthday and death anniversary, I wanted other people around me who had lost Katie too. But those people were in Indiana and Illinois. I had seen them a week earlier, for a fun run we hosted in Katie’s hometown, and we had all gotten along fine. Here was the drawback to having fled everyone and everything for California. I was on my own. The year I had spent drawing Katie’s family close to me, remembering her and spending some part of the day, week, month, birthday, and year in gentle commiseration became now my uncertain emotional homestead. Cait offered to take the whole day off to spend with me, but Cait and Katie had not been close friends, and I knew Cait would be worried for me, which would shift the emphasis. She hated to see me so sad.
Should I Still Wish Page 8
