by David Gates
When I first moved in with him, he said, “Will you still goose me while you’re changing my Depends?”
“Depends,” I said.
“Well said.” This was before people started saying “Well played.” “But how about this? We’ll buy them in bulk—so much Depends upon a red wheel barrow.”
Okay, I haven’t convinced you, and obviously the Frank Gehry thing doesn’t show him to advantage. But even my mother was sold—and if you want to think I was bought, fine, but that’s not how it felt.
—
The day my divorce became final—I’d been living with him for a little over a year—he took me to the Beekman Arms. “I hope you don’t mind my being blunt,” he said. “We don’t need to have this conversation again, but you do realize that things could get a little unattractive in the homestretch.”
“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said. “I could get cancer, and you’d have to pretend you were still hot for me. No boobs, no hair…”
“Maybe I’d like you better—you know my peculiarities. Still, the odds are in my favor, no? So—how to put this—if and when you should feel the need for more congenial company, do try to hide it a little better than you did with Young Lochinvar. But I’d be forever grateful if you could see your way clear to sticking around for the last act, in whatever capacity—well, of course not forever grateful. Okay, there. How’s that for a tender marriage proposal?”
I put my glass down. “That’s what this is?”
“All right, I knew I was getting too poetic,” he said. “I’d better just assume the position.” He stood up, went down on one knee beside my chair and took my hand. The people at the next table looked, then looked away.
“Good Christ,” I said. “We’re really doing this?”
“I think we’d be fine,” he said. “We could still pretend to be illicit—we’ll get you a pair of those heart-shaped sunglasses. Do you need some time?”
I shook my head. “I’d just start to think.”
“Never a good idea.” He kissed my hand and went back to his chair. “This calls for champagne. Joke, joke. Here.” He raised his glass of scotch. “To the loveliest widow in the Hudson Valley—in the far-distant future.” He took a sip and reached down to rub his knee. “I’m really not coldhearted, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t think I am either.”
“Well,” he said. “That part is your business.”
—
So, a month later I was taking that shower, on the morning I was to be married for the second time, in the bath off the master bedroom, while he was getting dressed on the other side of the wall. I came out in a towel—he had the biggest, softest white towels, though maybe that was to his ex-wife’s credit—with makeup and hair just right, as he was knotting his ironic bow tie. Not a clip-on: I was about to marry a man who knew how to do this. I saw him see me in the mirror. “Hmm,” he said. “You know, they can’t start without us.” Was I not being prompted to pull out an end of his tie with my teeth? Grrr—c’mere, Tiger.
—
We had the wedding downstairs in the living room, with white orchids on the Guatemalan coffee table. I’d just wanted the two of us to go to the town clerk, but he insisted we invite some family—“to keep things on the up and up”—and find a Unitarian Universalist clergyperson to do a plain-Jane service: no scripture, no music, no e. e. cummings. His parents were long dead, but his brother, whom I’d never met, said he’d drive up from the city. His daughter told him she’d booked a flight from Portland, but she called the morning she was to leave and said she’d woken up with an ear infection and couldn’t lift her head from the pillow. Okay, you did hear of this happening. My mother came up the night before and stayed at the house, and my brother flew in with his wife and their one-year-old. We had room for them too, and my mother claimed she wanted to reconnect with my brother, meet the wife and spend time with the grandchild she’d never seen. But he told me that he and his wife had prayed about sleeping under the same roof with a still-unmarried couple, and while he didn’t judge, he needed to be a servant leader in his family and it was best for them to live their values. We offered to put them up at the Beekman Arms, but they’d booked a room at a Motel 6 and would drive over in the morning.
He showed up an hour before the ceremony—we’d just come downstairs, and I could feel still-premarital slime in the crotch of my underwear—with the bossy little big-breasted wife holding the kid, who was sucking his thumb. “Your brother’s told me all about you,” she said. “And this is Zacharias. He’s a little shy. Well, congratulations.” Did she not know you don’t congratulate the bride? “I hope you’ll be very happy.” What a cunt. My brother brought her over to my mother, who did her kissy-cheek thing, then held him at arms’ length as if in reverent examination. “Look at you,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.” No shit.
The groom’s brother pulled up in a Lexus with a ski rack—he hoped he wasn’t late; the traffic was a motherfucker—and left his cashmere overcoat on the bench in the hall; he’d told us he had to get up to Bromley that evening. When the U.U. minister came in right behind him, my brother’s wife looked at her as if she’d never seen a butch lesbian before, clutched her one-year-old tighter, and the kid started to squall. Finally she had to take him upstairs, reluctant as she was to go where our bedroom might be, so we could get on with the show. Afterward, my new brother-in-law kissed me from inside his walrus mustache, clapped my husband on the shoulder and said, “You dog. Listen, gotta jet.” We took the rest of them to lunch, and after we’d gotten the baby into a booster seat and ordered drinks—Diet Cokes for the Christians—my brother said, “Would you mind?” He reached for my hand and my mother’s, his wife took my husband’s and the baby’s, my husband gave me a quick look and reached for my mother’s hand, leaving me to take the baby’s other hand, which felt soft and moist, between my thumb and forefinger. He pulled it away and began to wail as my brother said, “God our Father bless the bounty that we are about to receive in the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord amen. There, that wasn’t so tough, right? Hon, maybe you should take him and see if…” The bounty—white wine for my mother, scotch for me and the bridegroom—arrived none too soon.
When we opened the gifts, theirs turned out to be a leather-bound Bible, the New King James Version, with a page in front they’d had calligraphized with our names; lines had been ruled below for the names of offspring.
And before we leave the wedding day behind, just one final word about my little moment that morning; I don’t want to keep coming back to this as if it were some big motif, though I might be tempted to hit it one more time near the end, for the sake of symmetry. So probably every film critic in the world has already figured this out—originality has never been my strong suit, as I think we’ve seen—but in Psycho, in the shower scene, I think we’re supposed to think that Janet Leigh is making atonement for stealing that money, as well as for being a slut in a slip, which for a woman-hater like Hitchcock is really the sin, and simply washing herself clean isn’t sufficient. Only when the chocolate syrup goes swirling down the drain, and her open eye sees everything at last and yields up a tear—of contrition!—only then…et cetera et cetera. My point is, where was Mother when I needed her? To part the curtain, raise the knife and freeze me in a state of grace. Now there’s a cadence, or am I flattering myself?
—
I’d been to Rio, Amsterdam, St. Kitts and wherever else a snotty Yale girl goes, as well as France and Peru with my first husband, but I’d never seen what you might call America: just New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Colonial Williamsburg. So for our honeymoon, which he called a wedding trip, we’d driven in his truck (and thank God for four-wheel drive) across days of increasingly desolate late-winter landscape, staying in grimmer and grimmer motels, until the Rocky Mountains appeared and we were in Montana, at a turn-of-the-century hot spring resort where I suspect he’d gone with his first wife. By day we
skied trails in Yellowstone, just over the state line into Wyoming, and saw as many elk as a pair of newlyweds could wish for; by night we drank whiskey out of plastic cups while floating in water the temperature of our bodies, with snow falling on us. On the way back, we took a detour from Rapid City down to Mount Rushmore—“Would you mind indulging me?”—and he pointed above and beyond the presidents’ heads, which were smaller than I’d expected, to where James Mason’s North by Northwest house would have stood. “As you can see,” he said, “it couldn’t possibly have been there.”
“Whoever thought it could?” I said.
“Nobody,” he said. “I’ve probably seen too many movies.”
Mud season had set in by the time we got back, but he couldn’t wait to bring me up to his hilltop. He put the truck in four-wheel low, and we fishtailed up a dirt track, mud and snow and pebbles rattling under the floorboards. At the top, he got out, came around and helped me down, and we looked across the river at a rugged gray mountain on the other side. “What do you think?” he said.
I pulled the hood of my parka over my head against the cold wind and put my hands in my pockets. “It’s impressive that you own all this,” I said.
“Do you think you could live here?”
“It’s a little short on amenities,” I said.
“Amenities we can do,” he said. “Just draw up the plans and add money. You don’t want to live in a Charles Addams house the rest of your life. Hell, even the rest of my life.”
“I like your house.”
“You’ll like this better, trust me. I’ll show you what I’ve got, and we can fine-tune it together.”
“Can we get back in the truck?” I said.
He put an arm around my shoulders. “Come on.”
As we inched down the hill, heater blasting, I said, “You’ve wanted this a long time.”
“All my life.” He put on his old-timer voice. “Not yet.”
—
They began excavating on the hilltop as soon as they could get their machines up the track, and by late April they’d poured the foundation, dug for the septic and the drainage field and started drilling the well. Next year at this time, he said, we’d be in there. He’d sat me down in his workroom to go over the plans with me, and what he’d designed turned out to be more or less the James Mason house, right down to the triangular braces under what I would have called the deck.
“Of course Wright would never have used those,” he said. “You’ve seen Fallingwater.”
“You don’t mean Niagara?” I said. “That’s not Hitchcock.”
“Dear God,” he said. He jumped up and went to the bookshelf.
His plan seemed fine, what did I know. Flat roof, two stories and a basement, balcony all around the inside, looking down into the living room, with rooms off it, something like the high-end motel where we’d stayed outside Chicago—a Radisson or something, with a pool down in the atrium—which of course I didn’t say. Workroom for him, workroom for me, wall of windows facing west.
“For me to die in and you to inherit,” he said. “We’ll call it Viduity Manor.”
“I’m getting sick of this motif,” I said. “Maybe you should give it a rest?”
“Eventually, of course. Why do you think I’m running it into the ground?” He shook his head. “Maybe that’s not the happiest metaphor.”
—
I met my new husband’s old wife at an opening—mobiles by a woman who’d been a friend of theirs—somewhere in the borderland of Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen. He was in what you might call rare form, if it had been rare, most of the way down the Taconic—“Hellsea! Do I have a genius for marketing?”—but on the West Side Highway he gave the finger to a driver who cut us off, which I’d never seen him do; now I realize that he knew she’d be there. He asked me what I’d like from the bar, then started pushing through the crowd. A wiry middle-aged woman in black jeans and a black silk top, her short black hair moussed up into flames, came over to me. “Quite the wingding,” she said. “I know who you are.”
“I’m afraid you’ve got the advantage.” But of course I knew.
“I used to,” she said. “You’re lovely. You should last him the rest of the way. I see he’s in no hurry to get over here.” I looked toward the bar in time to catch him turning away. “One can hardly blame him. How’s life in Lord Weary’s Castle?”
“We’re doing well,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”
“So you’re feisty too. You’ll need to be. Oh dear, am I being the bad fairy at the wedding? I do like him, still. But I think he’s a task for younger strengths.”
“He always speaks well of you.”
“Aren’t you sweet to say so.” She looked over again. “I think he’s nerved himself up to face the music. If you’ll excuse me, I need to congratulate the belle of the ball.”
He shouldered himself between a young man with a tattooed neck and a drag queen with a lorgnette and handed me a glass of white wine, some of which had spilled onto his wrist. “How was that?” he said.
“It was fine. She doesn’t seem to bear you any ill will.”
“Well, good,” he said. “I hope that doesn’t mean her memory’s going.”
“She reminded me of you. The way she talks.”
“I suppose. We were together twenty-eight years. Twenty-seven.”
“Was she the love of your life?” I said.
“Life is long,” he said. “As you’ll see.”
—
The tree outside my window had leafed out when the daughter flew east to stay with her mother for a few days, then took the train up to spend a night and, presumably, to check out the new wife. I went with him to the station; probably I should have let them have time alone, but I wanted to be welcoming and he seemed grateful for a buffer. She was waiting outside with her bag: a slender girl, tall like her father, pale, with glaring red lipstick and straight black hair, a leotard under her long skirt. His truck had one of those extended cabs, and she insisted on climbing into the cramped seat in the back, sitting sideways, knees up, with her high-tops on the cushion.
“You’re older than I thought,” she said to me.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m making conversation.”
“You used to be a little more adept at it than that,” her father said.
“Well, we’re not so civilized out in Portland. It’s like, PBR and the Ducks.”
“Is that a rock band?” he said.
“Are you trying to be funny?” she said. “PBR?”
“Your father says you play in a band,” I said.
“I’m a fucking waitress.”
“For now,” he said to me. “But her band has been—”
“It’s not a band,” she said.
“I thought you didn’t like ‘ensemble,’ ” he said.
“Can I try?” I looked back at her. “Listen, you don’t want a stepmother and I don’t want to be one. Maybe you and I can just—”
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Can we go back to generalities?”
“So how’s Madeleine?” her father said.
“Queer,” she said. “What else does anybody care about?”
“Okeydokey.” Her father nodded at me. “You want to have another go?”
“No thanks,” I said. “But I like her anyway. Anybody this angry has to have a heart of gold.”
“Sorry I was pissy,” she said when we pulled into the driveway. “This is just a little weird, being back here. Did you change shit around?”
“I don’t think you’ll see much difference.” He got out, pulled the seat forward for her and took her bag.
“I don’t know, I kind of wish you had. You need to trim the hedge.” She got out and looked at me. “I bet you trim yours.”
“I thought you weren’t going to be pissy,” he said.
“I do, actually,” I said. “If we’re talking about lady business. Do you?”
&
nbsp; “Okay, I need to stop,” she said. “I guess I can see why you guys liked each other. Can we go in and get this over with?”
When she went upstairs, he patted my ass. “Sorry about the trial by ordeal. You’re doing fine.”
“What did you do with all my shit?” she yelled down.
He went to the foot of the stairs. “You took it to New York,” he called. “There’s some of your stuff in the closet.”
“Yeah, isn’t that appropriate,” she yelled.
“Give me patience.” He shook his head. “Why on earth she needs to make me the bad guy…”
“Because she thinks she’s a bad girl?”
“Even I know that much,” he said. “I’d hoped Madeleine would’ve gotten her over this.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to get over it.”
“She’s twenty-five, for Christ’s sake. Why is she still being so teenager-y?”
I said, “You love her.”
“Where do you get these insights,” he said.
I heard the door shut upstairs, and she came stomping down. “I knew you had this.” She held up a pink plastic-bound diary with a little gold padlock. “This is when I was eight. Did you and Mom read it?”
“Avidly,” he said. “Your mother was going to set it to music. What is it, your memoirs?”
“I couldn’t find the key,” she said. “Do you have anything to cut this?”
“I’ll look in my toolbox,” he said. “As I recall, it could use a little cutting.”
“How do you deal with him?” she said to me.
“We’ll talk,” I said.
That night he stuck to wine after dinner, but he’d been up since six and a couple of times I saw his eyes shut and then come open again. Finally he looked at his watch, braced a hand on the coffee table and got to his feet. “You gals probably want to have a little hen party,” he said. “So if you’ll excuse me.” After he’d gone upstairs, I opened another bottle of red and she and I sat cross-legged on opposite ends of the sofa.
“So how is this for you?” I said.
