He’d proposed to me on New Year’s Eve 2007, which we had spent at home, watching National Lampoon’s Vacation and drinking champagne. It wasn’t even eleven P.M., as the credits rolled, when he turned and said, “There’s something I was thinking about during the movie. I was thinking we should get married.” I know this isn’t a particularly romantic proposal, but I was so happy that I didn’t realize there was no ring.
He was the one who said, a few minutes later, that together we should select something without diamonds.
“Because of the whole blood-diamond thing?” I asked.
“There’s that,” he said. “But mostly I just think they’re tacky and ostentatious.”
“But you’re fine spending shitloads of money in ways other people can’t see?”
He smiled. “Pretty much.”
“Jason, engagement rings have diamonds in them. It’s the norm.”
“Yeah, because 1940s jewelers brainwashed generations of American women.”
“Is this about…” I hesitated, searching for a diplomatic way to put it. “The expense?”
He seemed more amused than offended. “I’m not indigent. You really can’t believe that I just think diamonds are ugly?”
“It seems awfully convenient.”
He shrugged. “I’m happy to get you a ring with some other kind of stone.”
I hadn’t previously given the matter much thought, but not having a diamond engagement ring suddenly seemed like being fake-engaged—being “engaged.” Months before he’d proposed, we’d agreed that if we got married, it would be at the courthouse, with only our families present, and it wasn’t as if I was going to wear a big white dress. Was wanting this one token of the establishment all that materialistic? I said, “What if I say I really want a diamond ring?”
Still amiable, still unruffled, Jason said, “Then you should buy one for yourself.”
And then—I’m not sure which of us was calling the other’s bluff—I did. Three days later, I walked into the Tiffany’s on Michigan Avenue and walked out an hour later with a $38,000 cushion-cut ring that I’d charged to my Platinum Amex. This was a sum I’d never have let Jason spend, or spent on myself, if I weren’t trying to make a point. And, of course, the ring didn’t fit right—it was too big, but I took it anyway, figuring I’d get it sized later. Outside the door of our condo, I put the ring on, and inside, when I held out my left hand to Jason, he said, “Whatever floats your boat, Magpie,” and I burst into tears. He ended up putting his arm around my shoulders as we sat on the couch and I sobbed and said, “I don’t understand why we can’t just be a regular couple.”
“What does that even mean?” he asked.
The next day, over dinner, he gave me a pair of fair-trade malachite earrings from India. Because I am either needy or an asshole or both, I later went to the store they’d come from to see how much they cost. They were seventy-four dollars.
* * *
—
By the time we were half an hour past the trailhead leading to Moose Lake, Jason and Ed were twenty yards ahead of Ashley and me. Sometimes I could hear the men’s voices but not their words, and I wondered what they were discussing. Ashley had been telling me about her job, which was in the marketing department of a gas company in Stamford, Connecticut; Ed worked as a developer in commercial construction. “I’m about to switch gears, though,” she said. “I’m starting my own PR firm, me and this other girl.”
“Cool,” I said.
The trail was narrow, and Ashley was walking in front of me. Over her shoulder, she said, “I have this moron for a boss, and it’s like, Why should I do all the work and he gets all the credit?” Below her daypack, I could see her little butt, encased in jogging shorts, and her tan, shapely legs, which ended in gray wool socks and hiking boots. Even though we were surrounded by birch trees and wildflowers and distant snow-peaked mountains, my attention was on Ashley—I detested myself for this, and I also couldn’t help it.
“You know the number one thing people say when I tell them I’m starting a business?” she continued. “They’re like, ‘But don’t you want kids? You’re not getting any younger!’ ”
“There’s definitely a double standard,” I said.
“Not that I don’t want kids ever,” she said. “But why rush? Do you guys want children?”
“Maybe,” I said. The real answer was very likely not, but I had learned from experience that revealing the truth would elicit a torrent of protests about the cuteness of tiny toes and fingers, the unique meaning imbued by parenthood. None of which I doubted, but I was fine not experiencing the toes, fingers, or unique meaning firsthand. To be a senior partner at Corster, I couldn’t work less than I already did—I usually billed upwards of two hundred hours a month—and I didn’t see the point of enduring pregnancy and childbirth and then hiring someone else to raise my kid while I was racked with guilt. Jason was more on the fence. He’d said he could go either way, which made it seem like deciding whether to sit at a booth or a table in a restaurant, but I didn’t want to press the point in case he came down on the pro-kid side.
Ashley said, “Everyone tries to scare you, like, tick, tick, tick, but two of the women in my office got pregnant when they were forty.”
“You’re younger than I am, aren’t you?” I said. “Weren’t you the year behind me in school?”
“Oh, that’s right.” Ashley laughed. “It’s funny because I remember us as classmates, but I must just be thinking of volleyball.”
Behind her on the trail, I couldn’t help sneering. That she “remembered us” in any particular way seemed ludicrous, given that we’d hardly spoken besides the day in the locker room when she’d asked me to tie her shoe. We’d ridden together in the volleyball van countless times, but I had always sat in the first row, and she, Suzanne Green, and Tina Millioti had sat in the back. Once, after we lost to a team at a school on the West Side, when we were still in the parking lot outside their gym, Ashley, Suzanne, and Tina had begun chanting, “That’s all right, that’s okay, you’re gonna work for us someday!” Our coach had been so mad that when we stopped for dinner at McDonald’s, she made them stay in the van.
“Wasn’t high school miserable?” Ashley said then, and I wondered if I’d heard her correctly, or even, perhaps, if she was making fun of me.
Neutrally, I said, “How so?”
“We were all so insecure, right? It was like this seething mass of hormones and nervousness.”
I said, “You never seemed like a particularly nervous person.”
She turned her head, smiling. “Yeah, well, I played it cool, but I threw up every morning before school for most of freshman year.”
Was she serious? If so, this would have once been a fascinating tidbit, it would have forced me to reexamine my entire worldview, but what was I supposed to do with it now?
“So Jason’s super-cute,” Ashley said. “How’d you meet?”
“At law school.” This response was true enough, and easier than going into detail. And I can’t deny that I derived a certain pleasure from Ashley Frye—Ashley Horsford—affirming my husband’s cuteness, but again, I kept my tone noncommittal. “What about you and Ed?”
“I roomed with his sister in college. I first met him when I was eighteen, but we didn’t reconnect until Kate’s wedding.”
“Is Ed older or younger than his sister?” I tried to act as if the question had just occurred to me.
But Ashley sounded cheerful as she said, “Older—Ed’s thirty-four, but he looks like an old man, doesn’t he? And he acts like one, too. He gets all cranky if he can’t take a dump at the same time every morning, or if I make him try anything new. He’s never even had sushi.”
Thirty-four? So Ed was my age exactly, and a year younger than Jason.
“He was really traditional about proposing, too,” sh
e said. “First I was dropping hints, then I was asking him straight up what the deal was, and finally I was like, ‘Okay, you don’t even have to do anything formal, but can we just say we’re engaged?’ He’s like, ‘Calm down, Ashley.’ Turns out he wanted to ask my dad first.”
Ashley, and not Ed, had been the one pushing for marriage? Shouldn’t he have been pursuing her? Although I didn’t find her appealing, I’d seen no evidence that he had more to offer. That morning, when we’d met in the lobby and walked to the parking lot, he’d said to Jason, “You catch that shitty pitching in the Rockies game last night?” and he hadn’t initiated any other conversation during the half-hour drive to the Moose Lake trail.
“Your engagement ring is gorgeous, by the way,” Ashley said. Apparently she’d taken note of it earlier, because she didn’t turn around as she spoke.
“Thanks.” I couldn’t remember what hers looked like, so I didn’t reciprocate the compliment. Instead, I stepped off the trail and peered toward our husbands, wondering if they’d pause so we could catch up.
* * *
—
Although Moose Lake turned out to be as beautiful as promised, a glassy blue expanse that showed the upside-down reflection of the mountain, I still felt distracted by our companions; Ashley’s personality overrode the mountains and the water and the meadows of yellow and purple flowers. When we posed for pictures, Ashley put her arm around me, so I reluctantly put my arm around her. Would she post this on Facebook? Before we hiked back, we sat by the lake and ate sandwiches we’d picked up at a bakery on the way out of town. In the car, as soon as I could get a signal, I checked my BlackBerry.
Back at the resort, before we parted ways, Ed said to Jason, “Call me after dinner,” and Jason said, “Will do.”
“Oh, fun,” Ashley said. “Are we meeting up for a drink?”
Ugh, I thought.
“For cigars,” Ed said. “Men only.”
“Thanks a lot,” Ashley said. “Not like it’s our honeymoon or anything.”
Jason and I looked at each other, and he said, “I’ll be in touch, Ed.”
As Jason and I walked out the rear exit of the lobby and toward the path leading to the cabins, Ashley called after me, “I say we crash boys’ night, if only to punish them.”
Once we were outside again, the late afternoon smelled clean and sweet and piney, and the sunlight was mellower than it had been during the hike. It wouldn’t get dark until nine-thirty. I said, “Since when do you smoke cigars?”
“You don’t know everything about me.” Jason said it jokingly, like a child declaring, You’re not the boss of me. As if this were an explanation, he added, “They’re Cuban.”
* * *
—
We got room service for dinner, and as we finished eating, Ashley called. She said, “Since the boys are being sexist about tonight, why don’t you guys join us for dinner tomorrow? We made a reservation at Piquant, and they can change it to four.”
Piquant was, I knew from reading the guidebook in our room, a swanky new restaurant in town. Because it didn’t seem worth the effort of declining—if I did, she’d probably just initiate something else—I said, “Okay.” Or maybe my willingness to accommodate her was the true measure of how tense Ashley still made me.
“Great!” she said. “The reservation’s at eight. This is the last hurrah for us before it’s back to the daily grind. Will you put Jason on? Ed wants to talk to him.”
I heard Jason agree to meet Ed in twenty minutes on the patio outside the bar. When Jason hung up, I said, “I told her we’d have dinner with them tomorrow night and, yes, I know.”
“You know what?” Jason laughed. “That you’re a hypocrite or a pushover?”
“Would you rather be married to him or her?”
“I’d rather be married to you,” Jason said.
“But if you had to pick?”
“I’d leave them both at the altar.” Then he said, “Her, because at least she has a personality. He’s a fucking rock.”
“Remind me why you’re about to go hang out with him?”
“Didn’t we already establish this?” Jason leaned in and kissed my forehead. “I’m using him for his cigars.”
* * *
—
For dinner the next night, Ed drove again. The decor of the restaurant seemed self-conscious—tiny multicolored tiles on the walls of the dining room, a sink in the women’s bathroom that was a long, flat piece of slate on which water pooled in ways I was pretty sure weren’t intentional—and the food was mediocre. We finished five bottles of wine, all of which Ed selected, and we split the bill down the middle. (Jason threw in his credit card, which was always how we did it when we ate with other couples.) When we reemerged into the night, after eleven P.M., I was solidly drunk. As we turned off the main drag to walk toward where the car was parked, I had a vision of Ed slamming the SUV into a deer, or something more exotic—a moose or a black bear. Before we got to the car, though, Ashley cried out, “Oh, this is the local dive bar! We have to go in!” She’d already opened the oversized wooden door and gone inside. I was glad no actual locals seemed to have heard her.
Unlike our hotel, this was a place where smoking inside was definitely still allowed. Most of the tables were full, and the people looked less preppy than at the resort—they wore jeans and jean jackets and flannel shirts. Willie Nelson was playing on a jukebox in the corner, and, a few feet from it, Ashley found an empty booth.
After a waitress took our drink order, Ashley leaned across the table toward me—our husbands had started discussing baseball again—and said, “I’m so glad we got to spend this time together.” I noticed a tiny black something—maybe only pepper—wedged next to her canine tooth. It didn’t count as real food stuck in her teeth, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing she herself would notice during a quick trip to the bathroom, but it seemed like some final, culminating piece of evidence, as if I still needed one, that her high school self no longer existed. RIP, Ashley Frye, I thought.
“My friend Cindy warned me that the secret of honeymoons no one tells you is that they’re really boring and make you second-guess your whole marriage,” she was saying. Even though I was sitting on the other side of the booth from her, her face was about three inches too close to mine; as she continued speaking, I realized she was trying to prevent her husband from overhearing, which was unnecessary, given the volume of the music. “There’s been all this activity leading up to the wedding, then you get away from it and the two of you stare at each other and have nothing to say. So we ran into you and Jason just in time, huh?”
The theory didn’t strike me as entirely wrong—more than once, I’ve thought that cribbage will probably do more in the long term for my marriage than sex—but I felt annoyed by Ashley’s implication that we had mutually rescued each other. I gave her what I hoped was a cold smile.
Her face was still overly close to mine as she said, “Did you ever think in high school we’d become two old married ladies?”
“We’re not that old,” I said.
She laughed merrily. “We will be!” She was definitely as drunk as I was, if not more so.
“I need to use the bathroom.” I stood abruptly, before she could decide to come along. So far, I’d been careful to stagger my bathroom visits, and even my outdoor pees on the hike, so they occurred separately from hers. I knew myself well enough to know I’d be unable to go with her nearby—another vestige of adolescence.
When I emerged, she was standing at the jukebox. “I’m trying to find good early-nineties songs,” she said. “Remember ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’? But that’s kind of a downer.” She kept pressing the button to turn the pages behind the glass, and I saw her select a song by Madonna.
Back at the table, our drinks had arrived. There was a group discussion of Chicago real estate, then Ashley said, “
Jason, I just realized I don’t even know what you do.”
“Immigration lawyer,” he said.
“Keeping them in or out?” Ed asked, and Jason said, “I work mostly on asylum cases.”
I wasn’t sure Ed or Ashley would know what this meant, but Ashley immediately said, “Oh, he’s your conscience!”
Even in my drunkenness, I stiffened. “If you’re referring to the Kendall case, it was decided by jurors, not lawyers,” I said, and under the table, I felt Jason set his hand on my knee.
“But everyone knows the dude was guilty. He’s a total thug!” The difference in the way Ashley said this and the way middle-aged feminists had said almost the same words was that Ashley’s tone was upbeat; apparently, she thought Billy Kendall had raped the cocktail waitress, and she also didn’t really care.
I said, “Kendall was acquitted because the prosecution didn’t have sufficient evidence against him. As for Jason being my conscience, I’d say it’s more like I’m his gravy train.”
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