“Leonard and I have something for you,” I said.
“Aha, you’ve been out,” she said. “I thought I smelled city on you.”
I led her into the bedroom.
“Leonard, what do you have for me?” She picked him up and saw the ring. “Oh, Tom.”
“I am not, of course, a beast of burden,” Leonard said. “I am an ornament of society, not a common toiler. But when he requested that I be your ring bearer, I could hardly refuse.”
“Oh, Tom.” She set Leonard on the nightstand and put her arms around my neck and looked into my eyes. Her own were lustrous with tears and ardor.
“It’s our first anniversary,” I said.
“Oh, my darling. I knew you’d remember, but I also wasn’t sure you would.”
“Will you marry me?”
“A thousand times!”
We tumbled onto the bed. It wasn’t the right time of month, but she said it didn’t matter. I thought that maybe now that we were going to be married she might get past her problem, and I think she thought so too, but it wasn’t to be. She said she was happy anyway. She lay on her back with our little bull between her breasts and untied the ribbon.
“I’m sorry the diamond is so small,” I said.
“It’s perfect,” she said, putting the ring on. “You picked it out for me, and so it’s perfect.”
“I can’t believe I get to be married to you.”
“No, I’m the lucky one. I know I’m not an easy person.”
“I love your difficulty.”
“Oh, you’re perfect, you’re perfect, you’re perfect!” She kissed me all over my face, and we made love again. The ring on her finger had magical powers. I was fucking my betrothed, there was a new dimension to the joy of it, an immeasurably deeper chasm into which to throw my self, and no end to the falling. Even when I finished, I kept falling. Anabel cried softly—with pure happiness, she said. What I now see is a pair of kids who’d been snorting the powder for a year, losing their connections to reality one by one and becoming (at least in my case) depressed about it. How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein? But in the moment all I was aware of was the rush the ring brought. While it lasted, I gathered my courage and asked Anabel to come with me to Denver for Christmas, announce our engagement, and give my mother another chance. To my delight, Anabel not only didn’t resist but smothered me with kisses, saying she’d do anything for me now, anything, anything.
In her own way, she tried. She was prepared to like my mother if my mother would appreciate her. She even bought her own separate Christmas presents for her—a volume of Simone de Beauvoir, some fruit-scented soaps, a lovely old brass pepper mill—and when we got to Denver she was good about offering to help my mother in the kitchen. But my mother, still traumatized by “A River of Meat,” declined the offers. She seemed determined to play the role of martyred working mom—she’d gone back to her job at the pharmacy, Dick Atkinson having married someone else—to Anabel’s indolent rich girl. She also, though I’d been explaining it to her for months, refused to grasp that Anabel had become a vegan and I a vegetarian. For our first dinner, I caught her making baked whitefish for me and macaroni and cheese for Anabel.
“No flesh for me, no animal products for Anabel,” I reminded her.
She was still somewhat moonfaced, but we were getting used to it. “It’s nice fish,” she said, “not meat.”
“It’s dead animal. And cheese is an animal product.”
“Then what is ‘vegan’? Does she eat bread?”
“The macaroni is fine, the problem is the cheese part.”
“So, she can just eat the macaroni. I’ll cut away the crust.”
Fortunately my sister Cynthia was there, too. After I’d introduced her to Anabel, she’d pulled me aside and whispered, “Tom, she’s beautiful, she’s wonderful.” Cynthia took up the defense of our dietary restrictions, and when I announced our engagement, at the dinner table, she ran to the kitchen for a bottle of pink champagne that my mother had bought in expectation of an Arne Holcombe victory. My mother herself simply stared at her plate and said, “You’re very young to be doing this.”
Anabel evenly asked her how old she’d been when she got married.
“I was very young, and so I know,” my mother said. “I know what can happen.”
“We’re not you,” Anabel said.
“That’s what everyone thinks,” my mother said. “They think they’re not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.”
“Mom, be happy,” Cynthia called from the kitchen. “Anabel’s fantastic, this is great news.”
“You don’t need my blessing,” my mother said. “All I can give you is my opinion.”
“Noted,” Anabel said.
Somehow we got through the holiday on civil terms. I slept in the basement so that Anabel could have her own bedroom. We assented to this maintenance of propriety to keep the peace, but every night, in the basement, as if to show my mother who was boss, Anabel gave me a blow job. This was probably the all-time peak of her carnality with me, the only time I remember her getting down on her knees. My mother was less than fifteen feet away from us, as the gamma ray flies; we could hear her footsteps, the toilet flushing, even the sounds of her bowel. After Cynthia left, Oswald came over from Nebraska for two nights, and my mother was so pointedly affectionate to him that Anabel remarked to me, “She’d rather you were marrying Oswald.”
On our last day, alone with my mother, we made our favorite stir-fry for dinner, and she began to drone on about money. She could understand our living on Anabel’s assets and doing something socially beneficial, she said, and she could understand our finding responsible jobs and supporting ourselves, but she could not understand our living in voluntary poverty and pursuing unrealistic dreams.
“We still have some savings,” I said. “If we run out, we’ll get jobs.”
“Have you ever had a job?” my mother asked Anabel.
“No, I grew up obscenely rich,” Anabel said. “It would have been a joke to have a job.”
“Honest work is never a joke.”
“She works incredibly hard on her art,” I said.
“Art isn’t work,” my mother said. “Art is something you do for yourself. I’m not saying you have to work, if you’re lucky enough not to have to. But if there’s money coming to you, you should accept the responsibilities that come with it. You need to do something.”
“Art is something,” I said.
“Part of my artistic performance,” Anabel said, “is not to touch money that has blood on it. To be the person who rejects it.”
“I don’t understand that,” my mother said.
“There’s such a thing as collective guilt,” Anabel said. “I didn’t personally keep farm animals in hellish conditions, but as soon as I found out about the conditions I accepted my guilt and decided to have nothing to do with it.”
“I can’t believe McCaskill is any worse than other companies,” my mother said. “It’s helping feed a hungry world. And what about wheat? And soybeans. Even if you don’t like the meat business, your money isn’t all bad. You could take some of it for yourself and do something charitable with the rest. I don’t see what you gain by rejecting it.”
“The Nazis improved the German economy and built a great highway system,” Anabel said. “Maybe they were only half bad, too?”
My mother bristled. “The Nazis were a terrible evil. You don’t have to tell me about the Nazis. I lost my father in Hitler’s war.”
“But you don’t have any guilt yourself.”
“I was a child.”
“Oh, I see. So there isn’t such a thing as collective guilt.”
“Don’t talk to me about guilt,” my mother said angrily. “I left behind a sister and a brother and a sick mother who needed me. I don’t know how many letters I wrote to apologize, and they never wrote back.”
“Neither did six million Je
ws, I guess.”
“I was a child.”
“So was I. And now I’m doing something about it.”
My own brand of collective guilt had to do with being male, but I could see that my mother had a point about work. When Anabel and I returned to Philadelphia and I again faced the impossibility of The Complicater, I was seized with a new plan: write a novella. Begin it in secret and surprise Anabel with it on our wedding day. It would give me new work to do, solve the problem of a wedding present for Anabel, prove to her that I was interesting and ambitious enough for her to marry, and maybe even reconcile her with my mother—because the novella I envisioned was a Bellovian treatment of the only good story I knew: my mother’s guilty flight from Germany. I already had the first sentence of it: “The fate of the family on Adalbertstraße was in the hands of a raging stomach.”
We’d chosen the Washington’s Birthday weekend for our wedding party, so that our friends from out of town could comfortably attend. Besides Nola, Anabel still had three reasonably good friends, one from Wichita, two from Brown. (She would terminate two of these friendships within months of our marrying; the third would remain on probation until a baby put an end to it.) Since she was inviting no one from her family to the party, and since my mother didn’t even like her, Anabel thought it was unfair to invite my own family, but I made the case that Cynthia did like her and that I was my mother’s only child.
Then one evening Anabel brought me a letter from our mailbox.
“It’s interesting,” she said, “that your mother still writes just to you, not to both of us.”
I opened the letter and scanned it: Dearest Tom … house seems so empty with you gone from it … Dr. Van Schyllingerhout … higher dose of … I tried to say nothing but every nerve in my body … to compare her childhood of inherited privilege and luxury to my childhood in Jena … unspeakable carnage of the War with modern farming methods … deeply offended … no choice but to speak my heart freely to you … You are making a TERRIBLE MISTAKE … quite attractive and very alluring to an inexperienced young man … you ARE very inexperienced … see nothing but unhappiness in your future with a pampered, demanding, EXTREME person raised in extreme wealth and privilege … already so skinny and pale from the kooky diet she has you … when a person is not experienced sometimes the sex instinct clouds their judgment … I beg you to think hard and realistically about your future … want nothing more than for you to find a loving, sensible, mature, REALISTIC person to make a happy life with …
With suddenly cold hands, I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope.
“What does she say?” Anabel asked.
“Nothing. Her colon’s flared up again, it’s really bad.”
“Can I read the letter?”
“It’s just her being her.”
“So we’re getting married in six weeks, and I can’t read a letter from your mother.”
“I think the steroids make her a little crazy. You don’t want to read it.”
Anabel gave me one of her frightening looks. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “We’re either full partners or we’re nothing. There is no letter that anyone could send me that I wouldn’t want you to read. None. Ever.”
She was preparing to rage or to cry, and I couldn’t stand either, and so I handed her the letter and retreated to the bedroom. My life had become a nightmare of exactly the female reproach I’d dedicated it to avoiding. To avoid it from my mother was to invite it from Anabel, and vice versa; there was no way out. I was sitting on the bed, kneading my hands, when Anabel appeared in the doorway. She didn’t look hurt, just coldly angry.
“I’m going to use this word once in my life,” she said. “Exactly once.”
“What word?”
“Cunt.” She clapped her hands to her mouth. “No, that’s a terrible word, even for her. I’m sorry I said it.”
“I’m so sorry about the letter,” I said. “She’s really not well.”
“But you understand I’m not going to see her again. I’m not going to buy her little Christmas presents. She’s not coming to our wedding party. If we ever have a family, she’s not going to see my children. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes,” I said eagerly, in my relief that Anabel hadn’t turned against me.
She knelt at my feet and took my hands. “People have strong reactions to me,” she said, more gently. “It hurts me, but I’m used to it. What I can’t stand is what her letter says about you. She has no respect for your taste or your judgment or your feelings. She thinks she still owns you and can tell you what to do. And that makes me very angry. She refuses to see who you are.”
“I really do think she’s miserable because she’s sick.”
“Her feelings make her sick. You’ve said it yourself.”
“She was polite to you in Denver. This has to be the steroids talking…”
“I’m not saying you can never see her again. You’re a loving person. But I can’t see her anymore. Ever. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“We were both half orphaned on the same day,” she said. “And now we’ll be full orphans together. Will you do that with me?”
The next day, I wrote a very formal letter to my mother, retracting her invitation to the wedding party.
We were married on Valentine’s Day, with two ladies from the clerk’s office as witnesses. We had dinner at home, spaghetti with spinach and garlic and olive oil, to symbolize the thrift that we intended to embrace, but Anabel had once mentioned that she liked Mumm champagne, and I’d bought her a bottle to mark the occasion with some small luxury. After dinner, she gave me my present, a new Olivetti portable typewriter. I was immediately aware of a more troubling symbolism: both of our gifts had to do with my work, not hers. But my novella had taken an unexpected turn—the young woman in Jena came from the town’s richest family, and her father was a brute—and I believed that Anabel would be able to recognize it as a loving tribute to her. So I bravely handed over a manila envelope to which I’d glued a white bow.
She opened it with a puzzled frown. “What is this?”
“The first half of a novella. I wanted to surprise you.”
She took out the manuscript, read some of the first page, and then simply stared at it without reading; and I saw that I’d made a terrible mistake.
“You’re writing fiction,” she said dully.
“I want to be with you in everything,” I said. “I don’t want to be a journalist, I want to be with you. Partners—”
I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.
“I think I need to be alone now,” she said.
“The novella is a tribute to you. To the two of us.”
She stood up and headed toward the bedroom. “I really just need to be alone right now.”
I heard her close the bedroom door behind her. Our marriage, four hours old, couldn’t have been going worse, and I felt entirely to blame. I hated my novella for having done this to her. And yet I’d been happy working on it, had been markedly less depressed in the six weeks since I’d abandoned her plan for me, The Complicater. I sat for an hour at the kitchen table, in a deepening cold fog of depression, and waited to see if Anabel might come out of the bedroom. She didn’t. Instead I began to hear the sharp gasps of her unsuccessfully resisting tears. Full of pity for her, I went into the bedroom and found it dark. She was crumpled up on the bare floor by the windows.
“What have I done?” I cried.
Her answer came out slowly, in fragments punctuated by my apologies and her tears: I’d lied to her. I’d kept secrets from her. Both of our wedding presents were about me. I’d broken my promises to her. I’d promised that she was the artist and I was the critic. I’d promised that I wouldn’t steal her story, but she could tell from one paragraph that I’d stolen it. I’d promised that we wouldn’t compete, and I was competing with her. I’d deceived her and ruined our wedding day …
Each rep
roach landed like acid on my brain. I’d heard it said that there is no pain worse than mental torture, and now I believed it. Even the worst of our premarital scenes had been nothing like this; it had always been fundamentally OK me dealing with temperamental Anabel. Now I was experiencing her psychic pain directly as my own. The heaven of soul-merging was a hell. Clutching my head, I ran away from her and threw myself on the living-room sofa and lay there for some hours, experiencing mental torture, while Anabel did the same in the bedroom. I kept thinking, this is our wedding night, this is our wedding night.
It must have been two in the morning before I worked up enough hatred of my novella to stand up and start burning it, page by page, on the kitchen stove. Anabel eventually smelled the smoke and came staggering in, very pale, and watched me in silence until the last page was burned and I burst into tears.
She was immediately all over me, full of comfort, desperate with love. How I craved that love! How we both craved it! Better than the best drug after the agony of withdrawal from it: the smell of her teary face, the soft avidity of her mouth, the warm solidity of her body, the naked fact of her. It was almost as if we’d deliberately manufactured unspeakable pain to achieve this level of wedding-night bliss.
Without being aware of it, however, I’d made a second terrible mistake, which came to light at our party, two nights later. The party was already uncomfortably weighted against the distaff, because Nola had failed to show up (she’d moved to New York, in part to get over her feelings for Anabel) and one of Anabel’s Brown friends had bailed at the last minute, while Cynthia and five of my Penn friends and three of my Denver friends had come from near and far. But Oswald had brought good mix tapes and seemed to be developing a brother’s-best-friend thing for Cynthia, which was fun to watch happening, and Anabel had drunk enough to be enjoying my other friends’ stories about me, rather than feeling threatened by them, and I was proud of how beautiful she looked in her strapless party dress.
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