Otherwise Engaged (16 page)

I call Michael on the air phone, but he’s not in his office. I leave a message saying only that we are landing in Chicago instead of New York. I don’t want him to worry. Actually what I want is to cry senselessly into the phone, which I plan to do later, if I am still alive and there is a larger part of me than my nipple left.

An hour later, as we are about to land at O’Hare, a deep moaning sound comes out of the wings of the plane. We slam down onto the runway. No comment from the cockpit. Nothing from the Don’t Worry men.

The stewardesses beam as we leave the plane. For some reason they are all in terrific moods. I am aware that I have been lied to, but consider myself lucky not to be pinwheeling across a cornfield in flames.

By the time I finally talk to Michael I am in New York, and feel that I have probably made the whole thing up.

Manhattan. The Royalton Hotel. A lavish lobby, ghost furniture draped in white muslin, serpentine-shaped banisters. Long slim impossibly dark hallways with portholes leading nowhere, into more blackness.

I am led upstairs by a young man who is dressed like a
bellboy from the forties. He is the perfect bellboy, making small talk with flawless light charm. He actually has rosy cheeks. He seems artificial. I have the feeling that around midnight I will wake up like the doomed astronauts in the
Martian Chronicles
, a claw on my shoulder as I try to plunge out the window toward safety.

We arrive at a small gray concrete room. There is a bed and a chair. Shower, no bath. Two hundred and eighty-five dollars.

I never take the first room.

The next room, as always, is slightly better. It has an extra chair, flanking a small round table in what would be a living area, were there any area.

The mini-bar. When the bellman leaves, I make my selection.

A small mixed-candy bag with one miniature Tootsie Roll, one miniature Necco (twelve wafers), two mini-Reese’s peanut-butter cups, one mini-Snickers, one Fire Ball, one Hershey’s Kiss, one orange LifeSaver, one Lemon Head, one Smarties, one barrel-shaped root-beer hard candy, and one horrible oblong sesame log thing. All in a tiny cellophane sack, tied with a black ribbon with “Jonathan Morr” written on it, inexplicably.

Eighteen dollars.

New York is pure cyanide. The idea of New York, however, is marvelous.

It was the eighteenth hour of the New York shoot, sometime after 2 a.m., and we were all on the set, talking about sleep.

I explained how I need my feet to be outside of the covers at all times.

Bill, the account supervisor, says, “I need to be as tightly tucked in as possible. Cold air on the feet is death.”

“I need them to be free,” I say. Meaning my feet.

My new partner Clark says he sleeps with his feet outside the covers too. I feel this is significant. Everyone is looking at us.

“You sleep with your feet hanging out?” repeats the client, and shivers.

Then the client, whose ski club once poured Miracle-Gro in his mouth when he fell asleep with his mouth open, announces, “I need to be fully tucked in.” He says it as though it is the agency’s responsibility.

I describe how at a hotel I have to go all the way around the bed and untuck the whole thing. Not just my side.

“I can go with the free-range covers but not the dangling,” says Bill.

“Whether I’m tired or not, I can fall asleep in five to thirty seconds,” says Clark. I consider the possibility of this.

“You are such a liar,” I say. He and I burst out laughing.

“You go music or buzzer?” Bill asks Chad, the research guy whom I once referred to as That Handsome Young Guy in Research, which I am sure they told him because ever since then I’ve felt uncomfortable.

“Buzzer,” says Chad.

“Right on,” says Bill. “I used to go music, but now the music just incorporates right into my dream. I’ve got to have the buzzer or I’m done.”

Clark says, “I like to be fully naked, with my watch on.”

“What’s up with that?” asks Bill.

“Earthquake,” says Clark.

“I buy everything about that except the watch thing,” says Bill. “What, you need to know what time the earthquake starts?”

“King or queen?” asks Clark, ignoring this.

“I don’t like the king,” says Bill.

“How so?”

“Too big. Too much room. I like to be in control of the whole situation. I like to know the borders.”

He goes on, “I think I only have enough body temperature to heat up a queen. I like to heat up the whole bed for when I start to move.”

“A thrasher,” I say.

“Oh yeah. I’m a thrasher,” says Bill.

“I can’t do flannel,” says Chad from Research, suddenly.

“I hate flannel,” I say.

“I’m flannel all year long,” says Bill. He seems proud. “I like to block out the world with my pillows,” he says.

“How many?” I ask.

“Two separate down pillows,” he explains. “One big fluffy one that I sink my head into, and one smaller one that I smash into my face so I get that underground subterranean feeling.”

“Window open or shut?” I ask.

“Open. All year,” says Bill. “Colder the better.”

“I need to feel the air on my face,” says Chad. He seems almost unbearably handsome as he says this. This may be the moment in time when he peaks, like a bosc pear.

He turns to Bill and states, “But you like sleeping in a king-size bed when you’re by yourself.”

He knows this for some reason. Maybe it’s because he’s from Research.

“Oh yeah,” says Bill.

“Do you have a side?” I ask Bill.

“Absolutely. You?”

“Definitely. Always,” I say.

“Left or right?” he asks.

“Left,” I say.

“Left facing the bed or left to you?”

“My left,” I say.

“Me too,” says Bill. “That’s my side too.”

“But the alarm’s on the other side, right?” says Chad.

“That’s right,” I say. “The alarm’s usually on the other side. And I have the telephone.”

He nods knowingly.

There is something going on here, but to name it would be to change it. I can’t sleep with strange men anymore, so I soak all of this in. The information.

While I was in New York, Michael actually called the catering company, and they faxed back a menu suggestion. He presented this to me today, over a small picnic at Muir Beach.

It is right except for one thing: the sesame chicken with Asian dipping sauce. I want chicken satay skewers with peanut sauce.

“Done,” Michael says.

We will also be having endive spears with Gorgonzola vinaigrette. Polenta cups with walnut filling. Then comes the mandatory poached salmon and thinly sliced beef.

I feel a sudden glee. Somehow I saw myself with large
aluminum-foil trays of lasagna, jugs of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. A checked oilcloth flapping in the wind, and maybe someone standing with a shotgun pointed at Michael. The fact that I am going to have polenta cups with walnut filling is spectacular.

I described our menu to a few close friends and colleagues today. Maybe ten or twelve.

What I find about wedding plans is that everyone wants to talk about them when I don’t. As soon as I do feel like talking about my wedding plans, their eyes glaze over and I can see them wishing they were dead.

Tonight after work, Michael came upstairs with the mail.

In it was a postcard from Graham, who is in the Southwest now.

“Did you read it?” I asked Michael. He had taken an unusually long time coming up the front steps.

“Of course,” he said. Then he added, “If there was anything in it that would have hurt you, you never would have gotten it.”

There are people who would object to this. They are people who were probably protected throughout their childhood by a loving father, and who have outgrown the need for one.

I save Graham’s postcard for later. I just gaze at the impossibly square handwriting and put it in my desk drawer. I hoard it, along with other sketches and caricatures he has drawn.

Graham is on a great adventure. But so am I.

• • •

We have just culled the guest list. It fluctuates between eighty-eight and ninety-six, our target number being ninety. Some ruthless editing took place.

It’s not people who won’t be attending our wedding. It’s people who won’t be our friends anymore. To deny this would be pointless.

I imagine long, elaborate rationalizations about why we omitted each of the people we crossed out. I see them confronting me; in my mind it is always at a supermarket, under the glare of fluorescent lights. I need a pat answer, something I can memorize.

It was just family.

We had to keep it small.

I don’t like you. It took me until this moment to fully realize that.

I feel there should also be an honorable mention list, of people we wanted to invite but couldn’t because they were inexorably connected to people we didn’t want to invite but would have had to invite if we had invited them.

We are having dinner at Powell’s Soul Kitchen, discussing whether I will take Michael’s last name and drop my own.

“I wouldn’t ask you to …,” he says, but looks pleased. That’s OK because I’m not going to, I think to myself.

We stare at each other for a while, raising our eyebrows every so often. I notice, not for the first time, that he is handsome. No one else looks like him. He would be impossible to replace.

We drive to the Theater Artaud to hear the Kronos Quartet perform. Each piece takes me to a different place in my mind. I forget that I am listening to music, which seems to me to be the best kind of music.

Afterward, we talk about whether we will have a girl or a boy, someday. It is a running debate, as if we are ordering a new car. I mention the name Raphael for a boy. I think he will laugh.

“It’s a beautiful name,” Michael says.

At home in the kitchen, we dance to Chet Baker singing “My Funny Valentine.” We dance the whole song, and then we dance past that.

Addressed invitations for four hours after work. Now I feel like a baked potato that has its insides scooped out and mashed and then stuffed back in its skin.

After I’ve driven to the post office and dropped them off, I call my mother. She takes this opportunity to express regret that her name and Don’s weren’t on the invitation. She doesn’t understand why it’s just my name and Michael’s at the top.

I tell her because it implies a transaction, the bride being passed from the parents to the husband. I tell her I’m thirty-six years old and not anybody’s child anymore, and that since I’m paying for the wedding along with Michael, it’s really our wedding. We planned it and it’s ours.

“You didn’t put my name on the invitation when you married Don,” I said. This doesn’t make sense, but it does.

I think I have her, when she murmurs, “I hope you have a daughter.”

• • •

Today Michael left for his annual Death Valley motorcycle trip. He and several other middle-aged men will be wheeling into hundred-degree heat, pretending to be Peter Fonda in 1969. Harmless, unless he spins off the road and becomes pizza.

Meanwhile at work, Clark and I presented the casting choices for the new cross-trainer TV spot. Another client meeting where they voice every possible objection and criticism and then say, “I’m comfortable.”

Then they stare at us until we get the idea just how much money five hundred thousand dollars is. Until we feel it in our bones.

Around four o’clock, Michael came back from his Death Valley Peter Fonda Impersonation Festival. He looked worn and empty. I made him his favorite dinner: unfried chicken from the Oprah book and red potato salad from the Susan Powter book.

After dinner, he kept talking about how much water he drank, over a gallon a day. He worried that he had sweated out all his essential vitamins and minerals. Later I brought him some vitamins and aspirin and turned out the light. He had fallen asleep with his reading glasses on, a copy of the
New Yorker
in his hands. The Jewish Man exhibit.

A trip downtown to buy Michael’s wedding band. It is white gold, with scrolled yellow-gold edging. They sized it for him in the store.

When I paid for it, Michael said, “Congratulations. You’ve just purchased your first husband. With the proper care and maintenance, he should last a good ten years.”

The saleslady laughed, after she made sure that I laughed.

I was thinking, No, most marriages break up right around the seven-year mark.

I was also thinking how great it was that his ring cost me eight hundred dollars and my ring cost him several thousand.

He admired a Raymond Weil watch while we were there. Tomorrow I will go back and buy it for him.

I’ll still be way ahead.

In two days I leave for Paris, to shoot the five-hundred-thousand-dollar athletic-shoe commercial with the French director, who looks exactly like Uncle Fester from
The Addams Family
. He is bald and wears a black turtleneck and black pants and black shoes and black socks. I wouldn’t be amazed if he stuck a lightbulb in his mouth and it worked.

I feel ambivalent about Paris, because Michael won’t be there, and Graham won’t be there. Then I castigate myself for not being happy. It is Paris, after all.

More and more I resent all activity. I don’t want to do anything except nap and finesse the honeymoon and read Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon, who obviously don’t believe in marriage at all.

In other news, they separated those Siamese twin girls today. They were joined at the stomach.

“Just like us,” Michael said.

• • •

Flew to Paris yesterday to do the commercial. I did OK on the flight until about the seventh hour, when I became lonely and disheveled and began obsessing on what Michael was doing now that I was hurtling toward another continent. I doubted that my powers of psychic surveillance crossed the Atlantic.

I tried to call him, but the air phones didn’t work over Iceland. After I had landed, it was too late to call him.

The hotel is stunning, much nicer than we’ll be able to afford for our honeymoon. It’s too fine to enjoy alone; it goads me. I don’t want to be here right now, would like to press a button and be instantly back home. Just a nice little red button on the side of the hotel bed marked RETURN, like on my computer. When is
that
coming?