“I’m not flirting,” she said. “I’m conversing.”
“Looks like you’re flirting,” he said. “Oh lord, on our wedding night. What have I done.”
“We were not flirting,” said the groomsman.
“I’d just believe that from you,” said the groom.
“Well, now,” said the bride. “There’s an easy way to resolve this. Let’s ask this observer for a factual opinion. I”—she laid her hand across her heart—“swear that I have never witnessed this man until these few minutes.” And with her other hand, the ringed one, she gestured to Davids, who had been sitting quietly, who was just getting up, leaving his tomato untouched, leaving a bill on the bar, was going to see the loved woman, husband, child, house, curtains, and so forth.
One time he had written the woman he (no longer) loved a letter. I feel like I’m investing a lot in this, he wrote. I have to get something back from you to keep this going. She might have been engaged by that time.
“All right,” said the groom, straightening. “Let’s have it then. Was she flirting with this man?” They looked at Davids.
“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose,” admitted Davids—because she was! Although later, after some review, he thought perhaps that moment might have been an opportunity to introduce a diversion, ask how the fine couple had met, etc., what they had whipped up for their honeymoon—Amsterdam? Rome?—that perhaps he might have let the poor groom be fooled for the first hours of his catastrophic marriage, let the poor bride enjoy her few days of pre-alimonious existence. This thought came to him because the poor groom at this moment looked as if he’d been struck.
“You cheating whore!” the groom said hoarsely.
The other groomsmen and the bridesmaids came over and joined as one voice, stood as one body, and accused. “You flirt!”
“He’s lying!” she said, but they knew better.
“On your wedding day no less,” they said.
Then, in a move Davids didn’t quite understand, they led the groom out sniffling and then they were gone, all of them. Left the bride frowning beside Davids in her wedding dress, hand clasped around her shell of champagne. Davids couldn’t believe it.
“Now look what you’ve done,” she said, turning on him. She was incredibly young and indeed he did feel a little ashamed of himself but she was the one who had flirted, not him, and she should have behaved herself and he would tell her so.
“You should have behaved yourself,” he said.
“Don’t you start with me,” she said. “You of all people. Look, here I am alone on my own wedding night.”
“That’s not my fault,” he said. (He wasn’t sure about that.)
“Yes, it is, and you’re going to give me a ride home as soon as I finish this drink.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are, unless you want me to go out and look for a rent-a-car and then drive home under the influence of alcohol and get put in prison on my very own wedding night.”
“And where are your parents on this evening when they certainly should be here with you?” he said.
“Not here!”
“I suggest that you phone them and tell them what you’ve done.”
“What, that I got married or that my husband left me?”
He considered this. “How far away do you live?” he asked.
“Close,” she said. “Two exits up the highway.”
Once, by the way, he had saved her. He wondered if she remembered, if she ever threw it in the manager’s face when she felt wronged. Said Davids’s name and “saved my life.” It had happened on top of a mountain in Colorado. She had gotten heatstroke, had nearly died up there. He had gotten her down, not lost his head.
So he let her get into his car—now he had an actual bride with him with all of her petticoats or hoops that she had under there filling up the front seat and he had to physically move her dress out of the way (which is almost like touching her, which he did not want to do) so he could get to the gearshift. The night was beginning to feel eternal and this really was pathetic, this was bad. He drove out of the parking lot, she complaining the whole time, “You just had to have your say-so. Why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut?” This, while he hollered over her, “May I remind you, miss, that you solicited my opinion? Maybe next time you shouldn’t ask if you don’t want the truth known to the wider public.” They went on like that until she shouted, “Exit here, this exit here.”
He pulled off the highway. “Turn,” she said. “Turn. Here we are. Stop.”
They sat stopped and gasping.
“This is no house,” he said. It looked like some sort of fallout shelter, nickel-plated and pulsing.
“I can’t go home yet,” she said. “I have to wait for him to calm down. You saw how upset he was. Let’s go to the club and wait it out.”
“What? The what?”
“It’s a dance club. Let’s go in, just for half an hour, then I’ll go home. It’s right here.” She pointed.
“You said we were going to your house.”
“A quick stop. One drink, then home.”
“This is not the party bus,” he said. “I’m already late for my visit.”
“Look, this is your responsibility. I might wind up divorced because of you. Divorced after one day of marriage, who could be so unlucky as that? So you better take me wherever I want to go and I want to dance one dance on my wedding night and drink one drink as a happily married woman and then I want to go home to my husband, who could divorce me because of what you did.”
Then she said, “You owe me, mister.”
Then she said, “You’re an evil man.”
He was very hurt. “I would like you to think about how unfair that is,” he said.
What he could say: Lady, I have another wife to go see.
But he might as well play the whole record to the scratchy end. “Well, I may as well, as long as it doesn’t take too long, because I have to be somewhere and I am now running very, very”—he looked at his watch—“very late. Honest to God. Jesus.” He pulled into the parking lot.
“And you may keep your curses of the Lord’s name to yourself because I do not want to hear that just now, thank you,” she said.
The club was worse than he could have imagined or just as bad at least. It was late enough now that people had begun dancing. He sat at the bar with a plain orange juice in front of him because he was not going to show up at the home of the woman he formerly loved smelling of liquor. The bride danced alone in her dress. Still, men started to dance with her. One by one they approached.
Everybody looked a little regretful out there, the bride stumbling a bit, one of them taking her elbow so she didn’t topple over. Davids put down his orange juice, stood, headed for the outside—because who wouldn’t take advantage of these few colored-light-studded moments to make his escape? Was he supposed to remain stuck to this bride for what could turn out to be the rest of his life? He himself felt a little regretful, a little melancholy, and it was a sad solemn moment for them all. He paused at the door, turned back, saw her, white and streaming. He remembered another time he had left her. They were on a subway, coming home from dinner, and he had jumped out at the wrong stop, left her there alone on the train, angry over a slight. Or there was the time he had stormed out of her apartment. Or the other time he had stormed out of her apartment. Or another time in the car, in the midst of an argument he had gotten out at a light. She didn’t go when the light turned green, sat there while people honked.
Who could want a man like that?
“Oh, fine,” he said and stomped back. He took her by the wrist and dragged her out the door.
Now she was back in the car with him. “Okay, you had your fun,” he said, leaving the lot. “And now you’re going home. Where do you live? Hello? Where do you live?”
And she wasn’t answering, because she was asleep.
“Terrific, this is just what I need,” he said. “Hey, hey. Can you hear
me?”
She was completely passed out. “Hey, wake up.” He kept driving. “Is this your house?” he said. “Is it this one? Or this one? Just tell me that much. I’ll do the rest.” He stopped at a stop sign. The street was deserted. He stared out the windshield. The pavement had the gleam of a coin, houses were hung along their plots of lawn. He had no idea where he was. The bride slept. He called to her again but he did not know her name.
He got back on the highway but it was really late now. Her street was dark, the lawn unlit, though the small diamond lamp by the door still burned. Oversight? Expectation? He knocked on the door and waited. The woman he loved, robed and yawning, opened the door. “It’s rather late,” she said.
“I was engaged,” he said.
“Everyone’s gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
(Pause.)
“I’m glad you came by,” she said stiffly, although he could see very well she was more glad he had left in the first place, what with this house and now this husband and baby coming up behind her saying, “Who is it?” The thin stick of an office-supply-store manager, who then shifted the lump of baby and sidestepped in front of her. He stuck out his hand. “Any friend of my wife’s,” he said and stopped.
“I brought a present,” said Davids. “It’s in the trunk.”
“Bring it here, why not?” she said.
He glanced back into the dark. “I better not.”
They all stood, saying nothing.
“I need to put the baby down,” said the office-supply-store manager after a while.
Suddenly it seemed as though the whole ordeal was over, though it had hardly begun. Nobody was inviting or getting invited in. Everybody was exchanging a second solid handshake and getting a single light peck on the cheek and everyone seemed equally choiceless and drab, the destined meeting passing and fading. Then the woman he formerly loved stood alone in the doorway, the store manager gone off to put the baby away, her light-pink robe around her.
“Let me get you out of here,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Come on, let’s run away. We’ll leave a note on the table: Gone dancing,” he said. “I mean, what would you really miss? It looks like some kind of game out here, like some kind of maze—”
He leaned on the door frame. “My own life,” he wept, “is an affliction. My own home …” he said, taking her hand. “I know I can be a difficult man.”
No, he didn’t take her hand. No, he didn’t say all that or he didn’t think he did, not all of it. But he must have because the woman he loved, loves, was saying, “Good Lord!” so he must have said some of it, but then again she wasn’t looking at him as she said it, but behind him, over his shoulder. “What is that?” she said, withdrawing her hand (so he must have done that much—taken it). He couldn’t bear to look but he did.
It was the bride, coming over the grass toward him, her dress trailing. Her face rubbed and pale. And he saw that she could be the answer. He could devote himself to helping her, to getting her off the drink, back in school. He would change her. He could force her, keep her in a cubby if he had to, just let her try to get away. And after a few years she would fall in love with him—not impossible. They would get married and move out to the suburbs, buy a house right next door to this very house. And they would have their own babies and name them the same names as their babies and he would take pictures at Christmas of his lovely wife and tots and put them in the mailbox of the woman he (formerly) loved, who in this dream had shrunk down and was shuffling in the corner of a room.
But even as he stood between them he already knew his wife would disappoint him. She wouldn’t go along with it, or wouldn’t think the same way, or be the same way, or in some other way it would all be imperfect and faulty and defective. He could see it—he’d be in the wrong house, living the wrong life, hefting ludicrous presents across wastelands and deserts, and in his rage at his marred fate, at her unscarred exit, he turned, raised an arm, to do what? To embrace, to strike?
“This,” he said, “is my bride.”
4
Husband
If you should have an ex-husband, who first writes, then doesn’t write, then writes to the point of absurdity, then refuses to write, refuses to receive correspondence from you, refuses to acknowledge you in any way, denies that you exist, then writes again, angrily this time, then less angrily, then angrily again, then leaves off writing altogether, not without a final declaration—he has compromised himself by writing to you, you should not expect to hear from him again—and if each time you are taken in by this, are at the very edge by his either not writing or writing, are poised on the side of a cliff, waiting to see, wanting to know, which is it: will he not write? will he write? until a little time passes without his writing, and you slowly take a step back, and a little more time passes, and you take another step back from the cliff that you thought would surely claim your life, and another step, and a few more, until you find you are on a path walking the other way.
The Mothers
The idea was to bring the two mothers: 1. The two mothers could help care for the baby. 2. The two mothers could help keep the place clean (rentals dirty so easily). 3. The two mothers never get out to the country. 4. The two mothers could pay (mostly) for themselves.
So that was the idea, except, he noticed, they didn’t pay for themselves, and they turned out to be of no help. They did clean—too much, under his very feet while he tried to get two minutes’ peace to read the paper, in the very bedroom while he and his wife tried to sleep. No, it wasn’t that they wouldn’t stop cleaning, said his wife. It was that one of them wouldn’t stop cleaning— his mother. Yes, he said, his mother had to because her mother wouldn’t clean at all. Her mother did nothing but stand in the way with her arms crossed or eat bread over the sink or say loudly how much his mother didn’t know.
So there were two mothers, but really, he figured, it was three mothers since technically his wife was a mother. Or four mothers, since one week in, his previous wife showed up to drop off his previous child and then proceeded to stay for days and days, not cleaning, not paying, instead bossing the new wife, the current wife, around. Picking up the baby and saying, “Oh, she’s filthy. Don’t you ever give her a bath?” So that the new wife, the young wife, so young she had hardly gotten past being mothered herself and could herself use a bath, turned to him and said, “You tell that wife of yours to put my baby down.”
That, and the two eldest mothers (his and hers) argued in the kitchen over soap and dishes and drainers and cups, over food and hair and beds and milk, floors, shoes, sheets, the outdoors, the indoors, the government, the law, men, bags, dust, and war (Cold, Iraq, and the others approaching). And there were the failures of the younger mothers for the elder mothers to point out: childcare, of course, being the worst and at the top, but also thrift, health care, and knowledge in several categories, such as geography and books and fashion. So at moments it seemed like two mothers might form a team against the others but didn’t.
“You tell her,” said the new wife about the first wife, “to keep her hands off my baby. And also off my suitcase, my clothes, my hair, my man. Hands off.”
“You’re just jealous,” said the first wife. “You got yours used. He was mine first so anything that comes from him goes through me first then to you.”
“Does not,” said the new wife, the younger, so young she looked like a child, another child and mother he had to take care of.
“She was never good at sharing,” said a mother who would know. “Never could share a toy.”
So there were four mothers total, plus his little daughters (potentially two more mothers)—the one from the one wife and the other from the other.
His own mother had never understood him. Even as a child, he had played alone with his Lite-Brite on the floor. His mother had never wanted to be a mother, he believed—but had any of them? he wondered, surveying the group. A piece of them did, a piece of each of them wa
nted to be mothers. But a piece of each of them didn’t. Even this new fresh wife, was she, too, showing signs of not wanting to be a mother? Sometimes. And was the elder daughter, at only eight—was she showing signs of it? Maybe. Was the baby? Was even the baby scoffing at him from her little bouncy, not liking, not wanting the role she would one day claim? Perhaps so. Perhaps they all blamed him, which is why they were all standing over there like that.
He had left his first wife for a woman he no longer knew. She had been neither a wife nor a mother. She had flitted off one night, never returned, and was preserved here today only in name, in script, tattooed on his arm.
There were no men other than him. Even the three poodles, shaky and shaken from travel, were female. They did have a bird once, a male, whom he privately named after himself and who died one morning and lay stiff in the straw of the cage.
He went into the kitchen. He’d been ready for a drink for hours by now, and they were ready, it seemed, to find out the things they had always wanted to know:
Did he call that clean?
See how he was?
Was he ready or not?
Final Days
He wrote and said the friend was dying, that these were her final days, and he thought we might want to know. We did want to know. We hadn’t seen her in ages, but we’d always liked her and wished her well. We’d heard she was sick (he’d written us updates every few months)—very sick—and we’d had plans, or at least thoughts, of going to visit. A year ago, when we first heard she was sick, we said we’d pack up the car and drive the four hours to see her, camp out in the living room like the old days, but we hadn’t. We spent a year saying, “Let’s get on the road!” She got sicker. He wrote and said maybe we could phone at least, send some friendly words her way, but we felt uncomfortable, didn’t know what we would say. We thought we could “catch up” but our daily affairs seemed so mightily small in the face of her being so sick. We thought we could email at least, attach a photo, but we didn’t do that either. Then he wrote and told us how she was flying to Texas, he told us about the experimental treatment, the chemo poured through her body, her weight falling like stones. We listened and felt bereft but still we did nothing.
Wait Till You See Me Dance Page 12
