by Kim Ross
“I talked to some of the guys at work and they pointed something out – “
“No,” I say.
“—it’s only the single guys that are expected to pull –“
“No. No. No. Stop. Bad idea. No.”
He doesn’t listen.
“—these sorts of ridiculous hours, the married ones –“
“I realize you’ve rehearsed this but I’m going to turn you down, you can stop,”
“—get a free pass on that, which got me thinking –“
“Max, I will not marry you,” I say.
He looks hurt. “Would you let me finish?” he says.
“God no,” I say. “You just told me you wouldn’t quit your job for me and now you want to buy me a rock and expect I’ll spend the rest of my life with you? Fuck yourself.”
“You don’t seriously think that your income would support both of us, do you?”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” I say. “You aren’t willing to make sacrifices for me. You’re just willing to put up with mild annoyances. Call me a romantic, but if I get married, it’s going to be to someone that’s going to stick with me no matter what, not someone who wants less hours at work and a tax break.”
“I really do love you, Jeanine,” he says. “I think we’re great together.”
I sit and think for a while. Normally I’d dismiss this out of hand but I want to make sure I don’t burn any bridges here needlessly. Marrying Max wouldn’t really be that bad – I like the guy a lot, he makes a lot of money, the sex is good, and we haven’t had any issues living together so far.
Still, he’s done a really shitty job of impressing me here.
Something Tiffany said a while back strikes me.
“How long have your parents been married?” I ask.
“They divorced when I was 8,” he says.
“We’re not getting married,” I say.
“Because of my parents?”
“Because it isn’t serious to you. You’re doing this because it’s the only way you can keep us together, not because you want to spend the rest of your life with me.”
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“It’s a secondary consideration. You’d be willing to.”
“I think I know why I’m doing this,” he says.
When he puts it like that he just seems like an ass. It doesn’t help that he’s wrong – I’ve learned a dozen times over that people deceive themselves about their motivations. I don’t want to get caught up on a silly detail, though, so I ignore it. “If you didn’t get special consideration from work for getting married would you still want to marry me?” I say.
“Of course. Mind you, it’s in my contract that if I’m married I get an extra three nights a week off and --”
I interrupt him. “So you’d marry me under your old hours.”
“Yes.”
“The same hours that you broke up with me over because you felt like you were stretched too thin.”
He hesitates a fraction of a second here. “Yes.”
“We’d stay together forever?”
“Of course.”
“You’d agree to sign a pre-nup giving me all of your assets if we divorced for any reason and half of your income thereafter?”
“That’s ridiculous,” he says.
“If we were together forever it wouldn’t matter.”
Max squirms. “That’s completely unfair. What if you had an affair? How do I know you’re not just in it for the money?”
“If you don’t trust me why would you want to marry me?”
He opens his mouth as if to respond before comprehension dawns, and then he sits there, slack jawed, eyes unfocused in contemplation. I get up and grab my things. This is as good a stopping point as any, I figure. These ideas will need time to sink in and I’ve got some things of my own to think about.
I pause at the door and turn for a moment. “Goodnight, Max,” I say. “We can talk more tomorrow.”
He looks incredibly crestfallen.
13
Back at Renee’s again, I spend the night trying not to feel bad. It doesn’t work. Logically, I stand behind all of my reasoning entirely, but I can’t shake the thought that Max and I were good together. I don’t want to hurt him any more than I already have. Maybe being willing to get married, to be tied down to me, is sacrifice enough. Maybe I’m asking too much.
Renee is out doing something somewhere with someone (likely dinner with Will) so I’m left alone with my thoughts for far too long. Eventually, I get tired of arguing with myself about Max and my mind starts to wander. When it gets to Jeremy I can’t help but remember the story he was talking about earlier, the one with the conspiracy and the gold vault and the maps. Ten minutes later I’ve used every journalistic resource at my disposal to pull up a satellite map of Europe with infrared and radar overlays. I cross-reference this with a list of historical holdings of the Rothschild family and one very complex query later I’ve narrowed my search radius down to what’s still a disgustingly large portion of land. Even if I’m a bit more stringent with my criteria and I only look at areas that that were owned by them or their affiliates for more than a year, I’m still looking at like a quarter of the continent. Manual searching is going to be impossible.
It’s going to be a battle of wits, then. Where would I hide a vault? Jeremy never gave a specific date that I recall, but it’s a reasonable assumption that this would have been constructed pre-satellite imaging. This means it won’t be disguised very well. I try playing with the contrast and cross-referencing regular area maps to look for anything that seems out of place but this gets me nowhere – not like you’d need a very big vault to hold all of the world’s gold, anyway; the stuff is valuable largely because it’s rare. It would be easy to just build something over or around it to disguise the location. Depending on what that thing is, there could be tactical advantages as well – a military base over the vault could guard it unintentionally. Or a bank. Or anything else with security --protecting a museum isn’t that different from protecting a bank, and there’d be no suspicion about wanting to keep the exact floor plan of a museum secret. My journalistic training screams at me as I proceed to skim down all of the locations mentioned in The DaVinci Code with no basis to back it up, but I can’t imagine the Rothschilds being that melodramatic and I don’t find anything to suggest otherwise. It would be something small, I’d imagine, and with their government connections a military base would be more likely than anything else. Maybe. I don’t eliminate the other possibilities as I weight options for a script to sort locations by likeliness. Checking things manually will take forever. This way at least I’ll be looking at more suspicious areas first.
I leave it running in the background. I’m pretty proud of myself: this is some CSI level bullshit right here. If it works, anyway. All I’m really doing is searching the web for each location on the map and then assigning it a numerical value based on which other words appear on the pages mentioned in the search – ‘military’ gets 50 points, bank gets 30, etc, Rothschild gets 100, etc – which is terribly unscientific and inconclusive. Whatever. In the morning I’ll have a sorted list, and if it proves to be completely useless I’m only out a few minutes. Time to move on to the Max problem.
I’ve got a legal pad and a felt tipped pen out making a pros and cons list when Renee comes home, glowing from whatever she and Will just finished doing. She recognizes it immediately: I’ve used this trick for years to try to reduce my problems to something I can think about clearly. To her mild disapproval, of course. I thought it was the cheesiness that turned her off until our conversation about my relationships earlier this week; now I’m starting to think that she dislikes dealing with emotional problems logically (or at all, which explains a lot).
“What happened now?” she asks, sighing. “Did you sleep with Jeremy?”
“Max proposed,” I say.
Renee seems at a loss for a moment as she puts
her things down. “You’re dealing with a proposal with a pros and cons list?” she says, finally.
“Why not?” I ask.
“Because you should know instantly whether or not you want to marry him,” she says.
“I want to be in a relationship with him and being married seems to be the only way right now,” I say. “I just don’t want to be in a relationship with him forever.”
It’s weird how talking to people lets you cut right to the root of the issue. I hadn’t managed to simplify it on quite those terms for myself, not that clearly, but Renee walks in and it slips right out. I think of my relationship with Max as transitory. Great, and something I want to hang onto for a while, but transitory. Kind of like a roller coaster. It’s fun, and it’s something you might want to ride for as long as you can, but at the end of the day, you need to move on with your life and get off so you can actually do something useful.
“You’re scared of commitment,” Renee says.
“It’s not that,” I say. “I just don’t want to be with him 30 years from now.”
“But you like him.”
“Yes,” I say.
“And you enjoy being with him.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re scared of commitment.”
I give her the roller coaster analogy. She doesn’t bite.
“That’s not how it works at all,” she says. “You’re just making excuses.”
“I just want something safe and –“
“You all jumped on me when I was settling for safe and you get to set that as your ultimate life goal? Meet someone safe and get married?” Renee says. She seems more amused than agitated.
“Not my ultimate goal,” I say. “I just want to make sure that if I’m stuck with someone forever that it’s someone who isn’t going to wind up being a mistake.”
“That’s like the definition of being scared of commitment,” Renee says.
“The only reason Max wants to marry me is so that he gets more time off work,” I say. “This isn’t like he’s some almost perfect guy who proposed on a moonlit night or something.”
“If he was you would have just said no,” Renee says.
“That’s not the point,” I say.
“Max at least tried to be romantic, right?” she asks.
“He tried to make some speech over dinner but I stopped him. Marriage isn’t a binary decision that you should make based on some silly cultural ceremony, it’s a bargain that should be made through civilized discussion at some length. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with a guy just because he hired a company to spell my name in fireworks or something.”
“I know you hate romance –“
“I don’t hate it, I think it’s cute,” I say.
“—but it sounds like based on your criteria that you at least should go back and talk this through with Max.”
I nod. “I’m planning on it. I just need to be confident in my answer first.”
“I just don’t get why you’re on the fence at all,” Renee says. “You like spending time with him. He gets more time with you, you both get a tax break, and you get an excuse to take a week off of work and go on a fancy vacation somewhere. Just get a prenup and a divorce lawyer on retainer. There’s no reason it has to be permanent.”
“Isn’t that what marriage is?” I ask. “Permanent?”
“It’s a legal state of affairs that provides certain privileges,” Renee says.
“But—“
“No buts. If you’re not religious that’s all it is. There’s no reason to view it as anything but temporary. Sure, there’s some financial penalty for breaking the marriage because of legal fees and whatnot but you can minimize that with proper planning.”
“Why are you so cynical about all of this?”
“You’re the one who finds romance cute,” Renee says. “Thinking of marriage in anything other than legal terms is completely hypocritical.”
“I didn’t expect you to take his side,” I say. “I thought you would be more supportive of waiting for the right guy.”
“What, to carry you off into the sunset? Would you even enjoy that?”
I don’t have a good response, so I sit on that for a minute. I generally enjoy being the one in charge in my relationships. The fact that Max has been a departure from that pattern is the only reason I’m taking this proposal seriously: with any of my past boyfriends the sudden reversal of initiative and control would probably have thrown me hard enough to refuse outright.
“You think I should accept,” I say finally.
“I think you should think about it and make sure you have a real reason,” Renee says. “Will could probably draw up a pre-nup or whatever. You might want to talk to him after you talk to Max again and make sure whatever he has in mind isn’t unreasonable.”
“Why can’t you just have a solid recommendation one way or the other that I can take?”
Renee laughs. “I’ve screwed up enough of your relationships as it is. It’s your life. Make a decision. Or don’t and go talk to him and see what he thinks.”
Lot of help that is. She’s right, I suppose. This is a two person decision – I’ve said that enough myself – and I need to make sure that Max is involved and has a fair chance to plead his case. I still need to have a solid stance before I go back in, so I spend a few more minutes writing things on the legal pad before I retire for the evening.
14
I call Max at maybe 10:30 on Saturday, after I’ve had some time to shower and think for a bit. He’s awake, of course. He’s a firm believer in keeping the same schedule on weekdays and weekends, which is great in a vacuum and terrible if you have any variation in your bedtime. Just another one of Max’s little quirks that I’m still not sure I want to live with for the duration of a marriage. I realize that doesn’t inherently have to be very long, but at the same time everyone I know makes fun of the latest celebrity marriage to break up after only six months. I’m not sure that I’m ready to join them.
“It’s a cultural thing,” I find myself saying to Max, on the phone. “As a culture, we haven’t decided what marriage means in the absence of religion. When someone gets married in a church it means something – there’s this idea that you’re entering into a sacred union in front of a higher being. When you get married in a courtroom you’re just sharing assets and getting a tax write-off. We’re all still trying to equate the two, even though they’re completely different.”
“Do you just want to talk about this in person?” he asks. “It sounds like you have a lot to say. I’m not quite sure what you’re responding to right now—“
“Let me finish,” I say. “I’m against the idea of marrying you because I want to get the first kind of marriage still, one which is a permanent arrangement concerning the state of our relationship, not the one with the legal benefits and whatnot. I realize they’re different. I’d be perfectly happy getting the second one if other people did too, but I’m not sure that I’m ready to be a divorcee a few years from now, even if we split in a mutually agreeable way. Not because I have any problems with it. Because other people would view me differently. It’s a cultural thing.”
“You’re letting other people’s perceptions dictate our relationship?” Max says.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s completely ridiculous to not care about what other people think. We’ve had this talk before. Whether you like it or not public perception has a noticeable and discernable impact on everything you do and not factoring that in is ridiculous, no matter how stupid the reasons people have for having their opinions are. In this case, I think that our relationship isn’t worth potentially losing –“
“None of your friends would stop talking to you if we divorced and you wouldn’t get fired,” Max cuts in.
He’s right, of course, but I’m not quite ready to think about it on those simple terms. “My opinion of myself would go down, though, because that’s influenced by—“
“You’re just scared
of commitment,” he says. “That’s okay. Can we talk about this in person?”
“Fine,” I say. I’m tired of hearing that from everyone, but I want to get this sorted out. “Where? When?”
“Brunch at the usual place?”
“No romantic crap,” I tell him.
“Fine,” he says.
Renee crawled out of bed at some point during our phone conversation. She’s staring at me oddly. “Who ends a phone conversation like that?” she says. “No romantic crap? You’re going out to talk about marrying this guy.”
I ignore her. We’ve been over this already.
“By the way your thing finished,” she says. “Whatever your computer was working on.”
“What?”
“The fans were going nuts around 2 am. I didn’t like, look or anything, I just checked to make sure it wasn’t hanging. When I checked again this morning it was done.”
I had forgotten the sort I was running on likely locations for Jeremy’s vault. “Can you print it off?” I say. “I need to handle this Max thing before I chicken out.”
Renee looks at me funny. “Whatever,” she says.
I get out of her apartment in record time. Normally I’d have been ten minutes hunting for my keys and figuring out which shoes to wear but right now I’m like a cartoon character and I dash out of frame for a split second and come back in fully dressed and ready. I’m actually really excited about taking this next step with Max. At some point in the last day I decided I’m going to let him marry me, and I can’t wait to get that started. I feel like I’m in high school waiting to get picked up by my prom date, except we’re in a mature relationship instead of me just dating him to make my best friend jealous and we’re having great sex instead of fumbling around in the backseat of his parents’ car.
He hands me a rose when he meets me at the café.
“I thought we agreed—“ I start.
“You were just putting on a show for Renee,” he says. “I know you get embarrassed by big over the top public gestures but we’ve talked about this before and you appreciate flowers.”
