That night, when I drop her off at the dorm, Katie gives me a small wrapped box. A Christmas present. I do not know what to say. I haven’t gotten her anything. She says that’s okay, she just saw this and thought I would like it. I open it up there in the hallway. It’s a coffee mug from the World Wildlife Fund with a photo of a baby chimpanzee on it.
I hate it.
“Oh wow,” I say. “I love it.”
She beams and kisses me, long and slow, opening my mouth with her pale nineteen-year-old tongue. It’s a different kiss than the mannered ones we’ve shared before. Before, she was always holding something back. But not now. There’s an urgency to it. She presses against me as we kiss, filling the crevices of my body with her own.
“Do you want to come over?” I ask her. She doesn’t answer right away.
“When I get back from break, okay?”
I can tell what’s happening: she wants to sleep with me and is trying to convince herself it’s okay. If I can just wait until after winter break, I can finally have sex with her and then, in all likelihood, dump her.
When I get back to my apartment I call Martha.
“Can you come over?”
“No.” She’s with Christopher and can’t talk. She hangs up.
I don’t tell Martha that I bought her a Christmas present. It’s a small wooden chess set because she said she wanted to learn. I’ve got it in my bedroom, wrapped and waiting for her. I hold my new coffee mug in my hand and look at that stupid baby chimpanzee and feel lonely and sorry for myself and horny. Mostly horny.
While I’m in Florida I think a lot about what I am doing with Katie. The more I think about her the worse I feel. I can’t do to her what I did to Mrs. Levine. Katie is too young. Too earnest, as clean and transparent as a sheet of plastic wrap. Hurting her the way I did Mrs. Levine would be too awful and I do not want to be an awful person. Especially because I think she is falling in love with me. And why not? I am older, more worldly, smart, zitty. (Admittedly the “zitty” part might not be as much of a turn-on.)
I think about Martha, too, and how much I care for her. How I don’t think I can keep sharing her. How maybe I’m falling in love with her. And why not? She’s a little older, more worldly, smart, not zitty.
And what I am to Katie, and Martha is to me, maybe Christopher is to her.
Ugh.
My first call when I get back to New York is to Martha.
“I want to see you,” I say. She is noncommittal.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe in a few days.”
Why a few days? Wasn’t she thinking about me the same way I was thinking about her? Did she rethink our relationship over the holidays? Are we through? Did she choose Christopher over me? I think that’s probably what happened. She had a few weeks to think about what we were doing, decided she had to pick, and she picked Christopher. Of course she picked Christopher. I would pick Christopher over me, too. He’s a (pretentious starfucker) great guy. This is awful.
Thank God I still have Katie waiting in the wings. Katie’s not so bad. She’s just a little young, that’s all. So she’s a little boring. So what? I’m sure not everything that comes out of my mouth is so fascinating, either. So what if we don’t have that much to talk about. Soon we will be sleeping together and that will make everything right between us, right? She gave me her phone number in Indiana before she left two weeks ago. I call her, the first time I’ve used the number.
“Hello?”
“It’s Michael.”
“Hi!” she says. She is so bright and chipper. She sounds like she just came in from a horse-drawn sleigh ride.
We talk about our holidays. Mine were miserable. My mom was miserable. We mostly just sat around watching daytime television with my brother and sister, Florida is wretched, etc. Hers were fantastic. She had an amazing time with her family. They tobogganed and sang carols, Indiana is so beautiful this time of year, etc. Listening to her talk about her time at home with her good, happy family, I realize the problem isn’t her. It’s me. I’m the asshole. I’m the one who can’t even see an amazing girl when she’s waving her pom-poms right in my face. If I could just get some of her old-fashioned Midwestern pep to rub off on me, we could be a great couple. That’s how people would describe us, too, as “a great couple.” I can’t wait for her to get back to New York. We don’t even have to have sex right away. We can even wait until marriage if she wants. This is going to be great!
“Listen,” I say. “I can’t see you anymore.”
“Oh.” Her voice goes kind of flat.
“I started seeing somebody else and I don’t feel right seeing both of you at the same time …” I trail off.
“Oh … okay.” There is a long pause. “Well, thanks for calling.”
“Yeah.”
“Happy New Year.”
“You, too.”
I hang up. I make a cup of tea and drink from the mug she gave me. I turn on the TV and watch the Knicks. They’re losing. When the game is over I sit in the dark for a while. I live on the twenty-sixth floor. There’s another building directly across the street and when the sun goes down, I like to stare into the lives of all those people, or at least the ones who do not close their shades. There are a lot of young families over there, a lot of single professionals, a lot of old people, both alone and in couples. I’m not looking for anything weird; I just like to watch them sometimes. A little while later, the phone rings. It’s Martha.
“I want to see you,” she says.
CHAPTER 6
engaged
A few weeks later, Martha breaks up with Christopher. No more secrets. No more sneaking around. We hold hands and make out on subway platforms. Our relationship flowers. We are in love. I want to spend every second with her. A year into our bliss she asks if she can move in with me. I tell her no fucking way.
At the time, she is sharing a musty uptown apartment with a very shy, very short African-American volleyball player who is also a hunchback. I know that sounds like a joke, but it is not. She found the place after answering a classified ad he’d taken out in the Village Voice. He seems like a decent guy, but I never get to know him well because whenever I am there he retreats to his bedroom and quietly shuts the door. The only time I am ever in his bedroom he shows me all his volleyball trophies, which line the room’s entire perimeter. How a tiny hunchback won so many volleyball trophies is never explained to me. Maybe there is a tiny-hunchback volleyball league. I don’t know.
(Also, for some reason her apartment always smells like lentils. Lentils are an okay smell, but given the choice between always smelling lentils or never smelling lentils, I choose never.)
Our living arrangement works great for me, but for Martha it is a minimum half-hour subway commute each way, an hour of extra time every few days when she needs clean clothes and to refresh the contents of her makeup bag. Eventually she grows tired of it.
“We should move in together,” she says one day. It is a conversation I’d been expecting and dreading.
“I like living alone,” I say.
“But we’re here every night, anyway,” she says. Then she starts enumerating all the reasons why it “makes more sense” for us to live together: it would be fun and easier and we would get to spend more time together, and more than anything, because she loves me. She is so full of shit.
I mean, I do believe that she loves me but that’s not why she wants to move in together. She wants to move in with me because I have a rent-controlled apartment, which is New York City’s greatest and rarest treasure. Having a rent-controlled apartment in New York is like living in medieval Europe and having spices.
“I really like living alone,” I repeat.
The last couple years have been the first time in my life that I’ve lived alone. I love it. Even though Martha and I really do spend most of our time together, having my own place means knowing that at any moment of my choosing I can ask her to get the hell out, and she will have to do it, as once ha
ppened when I walked in on her reading my journal. “Please leave,” I said. And she did. It won’t be so easy to press the eject button if all her stuff is here, at least without the manual labor involved in packing her things. If there is one thing I hate more than lost love, it is manual labor.
“Maybe I could just move in for a little while,” she says.
“Yeah, but if you do that, you’ll just end up staying.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Just for a little while.”
“No.”
She moves in the next month.
“Temporary,” she says.
Neither of us believes her. At first, Martha makes a few halfhearted attempts to find her own space. An apartment becomes available across the street: too collegiate. There is one down the block: too cramped. She looks at a few others but nothing is good enough. She is Goldilocks and I have the only bed in New York City that feels just right.
To my surprise, cohabitation works out okay. As much as I loved having my own space, I also love finding her there when I come home, or hugging her when she comes home to me. Now, two years later, I sit cross-legged across from her on the floor of our apartment trying to figure out exactly how I am going to propose.
The idea of marriage begins, as every relationship idea does, with Martha. She is twenty-eight, around the age when women first begin contemplating their reproductive mortality. I am two years younger, around the age when men are not generally contemplating much of anything. It starts as a bit, a routine she and I do as a kind of verbal punctuation mark to any happy, shared experience. Like maybe we are walking back from one of our regular strolls down Third Avenue to Ben & Jerry’s. As we walk, she might take my hand and sigh and press her shoulder against me and say, “Will you marry me?”
Whenever she says that I squeeze her hand and say something like, “Yes. Yes I will marry you, my sweet. We will marry and spend the rest of our days exactly as we are now, arm in arm, filled with Chunky Monkey.” But I don’t mean it. Not really. And I don’t think she means it, either.
After a year of those happy sighs, though, I start to wonder: Maybe she’s serious. Does she really want to get married? I mean, I think she probably wants to get married eventually, start a family eventually. But not now. Surely she cannot mean now. I am content to keep everything on its present course. But I cannot keep ignoring those little sighs of hers. Over time, I am forced to conclude that when she says, “Will you marry me?” she is not being metaphorical. She actually wants to get married.
Do I?
Shit. I don’t know.
After reasoning through the problem to the best of my ability, I come to several conclusions, which lead, one after the other, to my ultimate decision:
• I love her and do not want to break up with her.
• Nor do I imagine us breaking up in the foreseeable future.
• She is the first person I have ever envisioned myself marrying.
• Despite all evidence to the contrary, I still like the idea of marriage even though I cannot explain why.
• If I can envision marrying her, perhaps I should marry her. One day. Not now.
• If I believe I am going to eventually marry her one day, why not marry her now? The only reason not to would be that a part of me believes somebody better might come along, and if I really believe that, then the right thing to do would actually be to break up with her now, which I do not want to do, thus taking me back to the top of my “logic ladder™” (a term I have just invented, and am in the process of trademarking).
But logic does not feel like a good enough reason to get married. Marriage is an emotional act as much as a rational one. My emotions aren’t there yet. As I am thinking about all this, a quiet mantra begins to insert itself into my brain. I am almost embarrassed to admit that this happened, but it did. In the weeks leading up to my decision, I start hearing a voice. It is an actual voice speaking to me from someplace at the back of my brain. This is what the voice says: Choose hope over fear. I hear the voice all the time, the same four words again and again.
Needless to say, the voice sounds a lot like Oprah.
I am at a loss to explain the voice in my head. I am not a religious person and do not believe the voice has any religious significance. Nor am I a regular viewer of The Oprah Winfrey Show. But the voice is there nonetheless, quiet and unyielding. Choose hope over fear, it insists.
It is two days before Christmas, three Christmases after I first realized I was falling in love with her. We are leaving for her parents’ house in Minnesota the following morning and have decided to open our presents before we go so that we do not have to lug gifts back and forth. When we are done opening presents—books, girly soaps, a sweater, a couple of CDs—Martha looks at me and quietly asks, “Isn’t there something else?”
She knows.
I was worried about this. A few weeks ago, I stupidly left the computer on one day while researching diamonds on the Internet. I went out to run an errand, and when I returned she was home, the computer still on a Web page listing the Four C’s of diamond buying (color, cut, clarity, carat). She didn’t say anything about it, and I wasn’t sure whether she even saw the monitor. But I was pretty sure she did. Because she sees everything.
“Yes,” I say. “There’s something else.”
Her eyes widen.
“I ordered that food processor you wanted, but it’s late.” This is true. I really did buy her the Cuisinart she wanted; it’s late because I didn’t order it on time.
“Oh,” she says and straightens her face into a smile. “Thank you.” She kisses me.
“You’re welcome. Merry Christmas.”
I then excuse myself because I have hidden her engagement ring in the bedroom. Also, I feel a severe case of diarrhea coming on.
Earlier that night, I’d asked her what she wanted for dinner. I wanted to make the night special, but I didn’t want to tip my hand, suspecting that she already knew I was going to propose. Rather than make reservations at some hoity-toity restaurant, I just casually offered to take her wherever she wanted to go.
“You know what I want? KFC,” she said.
“Really?” I asked. “Because we could probably go someplace a little nicer.”
“No. I’m in the mood for KFC.”
My marriage proposal was preceded by a three-piece order of regular crispy, mashed potatoes with gravy, and two biscuits. Utensil of choice for the most important night of our lives: the spork.
Now that the moment is upon me, the combination of nerves and four thousand calories of secret herbs and spices is exacting a very specific toll on my body in the form of what I will delicately refer to as an “ass geyser.”
After a painful and rather effluvial half hour, I sneak into our bedroom to retrieve the ring. Martha is still in the living room when I return, the ring box hidden behind my back. How to do this? The whole “on bended knee” thing has always struck me as kind of corny. Who am I, Sir Lancelot? Instead I just sit down beside her and present the box. Inside is the one-carat, classic-cut, “Tiffany style” platinum diamond ring I ordered from the Internet.
(Yes, I ordered my wife’s engagement ring off the Internet because it was so much cheaper than Tiffany’s. I think Tiffany’s is such a rip-off. I hate that place. It is, of course, Martha’s favorite store.)
“You know what? There was something else,” I say, presenting the ring. I don’t know how else to say it, so I just say it: “Will you marry me?”
She takes a deep breath and gives the answer every man wants to one day hear: “I don’t know.”
I am overjoyed. Wait. What? What did she just say?
“I don’t know,” she stammers, “I just need to think for a second.”
She needs to think? Think about what? For a year now she’s been saying she wants to get married. “Mmm, ice cream, let’s get married.” “Yay. We’re having sex. Let’s get married.” �
�This is a good TV show. Let’s get married.” Now I’m proposing and she needs to think about it? What the fuck?
Maybe I really did catch her off guard. Maybe she didn’t see the diamond information on the computer screen. Maybe this is all a complete shock to her. Maybe I just made a huge mistake.
Finally, after what feels like a long silence, she says, “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, I’ll marry you.”
But now I’m a little freaked out.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because it seems like maybe you’re not sure.”
“I’m sure. Yes.”
“Because if you’re not sure …”
“Yes!”
She’s sure. We’re getting married. I leap on top of her and kiss her on the hardwood floor.
“Ow,” she says. “You’re hurting my back.”
We wait until the next morning to start calling people. Our friend Kerri, my mom, her childhood BFF, Kaela. We tell everybody except her mom and dad since we are arriving there in the morning and figure it will be more fun to tell them in person.
Her parents pick us up at the Hubert Humphrey Airport and drive us to the fading Brady Bunch–style suburban split-level they’ve lived in for thirty years. Martha’s parents are good people, but they are Minnesotans, descended from the chilly people of northern Europe. They do not know how to express emotion and rarely talk about anything beyond the local sports teams or the weather.
When we arrive at the house, we assemble in the foyer to shed our coats and boots. Her parents are there, her younger sister is there, the dog is there, jumping on everybody. Everybody yells at the dog. Martha and I make eye contact. There’s too much bustle. Clearly this is not the best time to make our announcement.
Martha says, “Guess what? We’re getting married!”
A moment of flustered silence follows. Even the dog seems a little unsure what to do. Then her mom says, “Oh! Well …,” letting the word well dangle into infinity. It is not disapproval in her voice, exactly. I don’t know what it is. Surprise, maybe. Not the good kind. The kind where the doctor says you might need some more tests.
You're Not Doing It Right Page 6
