Otherwise Engaged (2 page)

I wear a black sheer-paneled skirt and a long knit jacket from my first trip to Paris. Black hose, black heels. I put on my earrings with my eyes still on him. I hook the wire through the hole, blind.

We drive across the Golden Gate Bridge without speaking. Black Saab, top down. I’m wearing a velvet hat and dark sunglasses. We are listening to the jazz station. This would make a good commercial, is what I’m thinking. Also I am wondering how I am going to live if he doesn’t ask. We would have to break up immediately, tonight. This instant. My mind flips back and forth, a fish on the deck.

We arrive and valets grab the keys from his hand, open doors. Once inside, we are quickly seated. Time is speeding up, not slowing down as in emergencies. Table in the corner. The perfect table, I am thinking. Now he has to ask me. The center tables are ambiguous. The corner tables are definite.

They pour the wine. He tastes it, nodding. He orders our food; I let him. I can’t feel my legs.

There is a long, flesh-eating silence.

And then he says, “So what should we do?”

“About what?” I ask, caressing the stem of my glass. I am going to make this as difficult as possible for him, I don’t know why. There seem to be bonus points involved.

“You know what,” he says.

He has a wide, strange smile, like a maniac who is about to reveal that he is strapped full of Plastique explosives.

“What what?” I ask.

Now I am smiling too. I can’t help it.

“Maybe we should get engaged.” He says it.

“Maybe we should,” I say.

I take a long, slow sip of wine. I have seen our cat, Cow Kitty, whom we call the Cow for short, do this to bees. First he stuns them and then he watches them die.

“Do I have to do it now?” Michael asks. He sees the waiter headed toward us, a large tray held expertly overhead. He has ordered the Yankee Flatiron Pot Roast, with baby vegetables. $28.95. “Can’t we wait until after?” he says.

“No. You have to ask me now,” I say. The pot roast is an incentive, making sure it’s hot when he eats it. I’ll get this out of the way, he’s thinking, and then there will be pot roast.

“Will you marry me?” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

We kiss. People around us continue to eat. It seems there should be something else, but there isn’t. It’s just a question, after all. Five words, including the answer. The pot roast arrives and he eats it all. I barely touch my cod; it is impossibly pale. I can see the plate through it. It occurs to me that I may be dreaming. I pinch my arm.

“What are you smiling at?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say. I’m awake, I don’t say.

I always thought I would cry, but I don’t. I laugh.

Later we get on the speaker phone and call my mother, who lives in Carmel with my stepfather, Don. She whoops.

It’s difficult not to feel insulted. We finally found a buyer for the Edsel.

All night, I envision my future life. I lie faceup on the bed, like an egg. I baste in entitlement.

Considerable lifetime benefits apply as Michael’s wife. His French onion soup, the Julia Child recipe with homemade beef stock. An exhaustive two-day ritual from which he consistently emerges embittered, swearing this is really the last time. The very last.

Now he will have to make it, despite threats to the contrary. As his wife I could leave him, and take things that are his with me.

I mentally pore over my haul, fanning the Halloween candy out to gloat.

His eyes are the color of caramel, with a ring of hazel. His skin smells clean, like paper. The thick brown kind, from grade school. His skin smells like a good memory. If I can keep part of me in contact with it, I have the impression I will never be harmed.

Listening to him impersonate people we know, while we are lying in bed. Male or female, he is equally proficient. In addition he does the voice of the Cow so you think that must be what his voice really is.

I write ads for athletic shoes; Michael is a marketing director across town. Since he makes more money than I do, I could quit my job, for about three weeks. At that point the people from American Express would begin to arrive in helicopters. Still. I could never do that before.

Once when I was away on a long television campaign shoot in Morocco, he drank martinis and overate red meat at Izzy’s every night until the very last day, and then he got a migraine and went to emergency. They gave him Demerol and sent him home. When I arrived home he gave me his hospital wristband, and called it Jewish jewelry.

He takes me out to dinner in the middle of the week, saying,
“I’m taking you out to dinner.” When I’m depressed, he makes me a soft-boiled egg in a cup, with buttered toast fingers.

There are also the long-term aspects. The Not Dying a Bitter Old Maid with a Companion Dog thing.

Actually I’ve thought about it and if I die I want to be incinerated and then immediately scattered. I don’t want anyone looking at my dead body, especially Michael. I don’t like the idea of not being able to suck in my stomach or slant my hips.

What is this “if”? I am going to die. But I will die married, unless it doesn’t work out. In that case, I would have to scramble for a replacement Michael. This would not be easy.

He does a chilling Deepak Chopra.

This is not my first engagement.

I have a photograph of myself at twenty-seven, thinner and with long hair, holding up a butterfish on a pier in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. I am standing alongside my semiprofessional basketball player ex-boyfriend, the one who used to strangle me.

He was the first man to ever propose. It was 1986, and we were tweaking on cocaine at his house in the Berkeley hills. We had just swallowed a Quaalude apiece, to take the edge off the coke. I swallowed the Quaalude, he asked me, and I said yes.

He looks happy in the photograph and so do I. I once saw him vomit into the kitchen trash can, and a moment later continue to mix drinks.

When he gave me a black eye, I left him.

But thanks for asking, in other words.

I went to look at rings, at Tiffany’s. Alone. I wanted to get the lay of the land.

A Chinese man with a terrible wig sells me up to a twenty-thousand-dollar ring. A wide platinum band with a huge white diamond slid into it. I have a hard time taking it off. I keep looking at myself in the mirror, with my hand held on my cheek like an Oil of Olay ad.

The ring twinkles madly. It seems to whisper,
Hey girl. You really deserve me.

Everything else is really going to be a letdown, after me.

I am the IT ring.

Nearby a woman with a thick Southern accent is laughing softly and explaining how she can’t consider anything less than three carats. The saleswoman, a tall woman with Teutonic high cheekbones and black-rimmed glasses, nods in tacit agreement. Her blond chignon is wound tight as her smile. Yes, I imagine her saying, the children too. Everyone into the ovens.

As I leave Tiffany’s, I walk past the security man with the tinted glasses. He looks at me. I immediately look down. I notice that the carpets are stained.

I am pretty sure that Audrey Hepburn would not be caught dead here.

Everyone asks the same two questions.

“Did you know he was going to do it?”

“I had a feeling,” I say. My eyes slide sideways of their own accord.

They launch the second question right away.

“Have you set a date?”

“October nineteenth, of next year.”

I feel spared. My perception is that if you don’t have a date, they stone you.

We went to look at rings together, at Shreve’s. Since 1852. Michael said if we found something, we could buy it today. I felt I had just won a game show. It was all I could do to keep from skipping down the aisle.

Earlier this morning, I confessed to Michael I had fallen in love with the Chinese wig man Tiffany ring. I mentioned the twenty-thousand-dollar price. He assured me that this would never happen. Then when we got to Shreve’s, he was more than happy to fork over seven thousand dollars for the one I really wanted.

The ring is my lump-sum payment for everything bad that has ever happened to me. I don’t feel I can tell people this, or they will spoil it. I found it last week, when I cased the place alone. It meets all the minimum requirements for Cut, Color, and Clarity, as outlined by our salesman, Reed Cashman, who looks like an international spy posing as a diamond salesman. It’s a carat, in a simple four-prong solitaire setting.

That’s a lie. It’s .81 carat. I round up.

My mother called this morning to brief me on a fight she has had with Don. It was about his underwear being dyed pink.

“Accidentally,” she adds.

She has done this before. Never her underwear, always his. It’s not a mistake; it’s repertoire.

“What would Freud say?” I ask.

“What did Freud know about laundry?” she asks. “Screw Freud.”

This seems to settle things.

We exchange stories of malcontent fashioned from the oddments of our lives as women. She tells me about the laundry fight. I tell her about the commitment wars.

We are coming home from dinner. Michael has broken up with Gabrielle, in the Longest Breakup in the History of the World. She has moved out of his flat, and after a suitable period of insensate philandering, Michael has been dating me for six months. A quantity of wine has gone by from a place called Frog’s Leap.

The word “commitment” is brandished.

“You’re afraid of commitment,” I pronounce.

Silence.

“You’ll never change,” I say. “You don’t want to build anything.”

Michael says nothing, but continues to drive very carefully. There is a bomb in the car, his movements suggest.

“Fine,” I pronounce. “You should just be alone, then.”

Being with me is his only option. Distantly I know this is flawed logic, but I don’t have time to work it out. I slam out of the car and hurry up the front steps of my building. My high heels make a good sound on the marble. At this point I am completely in the moment, just doing the scene. It’s as Andy Warhol said: When I open my eyes, the movie begins.

I reach the door. Hand on the knob, I mentally preview the remainder of the night: alone, chain-smoking, waiting all night for the apology call, which doesn’t come, because he hasn’t actually done anything. Which is the problem. He never does anything, which lends itself to me doing all sorts of things.

I dash back down the stairs.

As I hit the street, his turn signal is blinking. Small terrifying puffs of smoke are coming from his exhaust pipe. His car inches forward, about to pull out into traffic. I begin to run, realizing how foolish I look. A large truck with the words
ENJOY LIFE, EAT OUT MORE OFTEN
roars by, delaying him by the necessary seconds. I reach the car and grasp the handle of his door, as if to stop it by physical force. I remember thinking that if I had to, I would.

We look at each other through the glass. He stops the car, but does not roll his window down.

“Hey,” I say; it is all I can think of. Also I’m out of breath. And drunk. I’m fairly certain of that now.

His face doesn’t change expression as his arm reaches around to unbuckle his seatbelt. I keep my eyes trained on his arm. If I look away he will change his mind.

That night he tells me he loves me, for the first time.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because you ran.”

I met Michael at a Christmas party in 1992. We were introduced by Lesli, an agency producer I worked with at the time. He was alone, although Lesli informed me that he was living with a Frenchwoman whom he might marry. Then
where is she? I thought, ever the mercenary. I felt it was like someone leaving an Italian greyhound tied loosely to a parking meter outside a liquor store: foolish.

I had seen him before, black haired, handsome, wearing a worn leather jacket and heavy dark boots, carrying a motorcycle helmet. Slouching up against a pillar inside the ad agency where I worked, knowing of course how the helmet helped, along with his unfamiliarity, his Guest Star sheen. He was freelancing there, getting twelve hundred a day to consider new and exciting ways to market salad oil, to make salad oil huge. I found it charming, his willingness to discuss things nobody else wanted to discuss. His eagerness to survive.

Michael has that. You get the feeling that if you were with him and you were taken hostage by terrorists with red bandannas, you would be among the few to escape. And that while you were waiting to escape, you would somehow be made comfortable.

And now here he was, at this Christmas party. Unattended.

Over icy Cosmopolitans in martini glasses, I discovered that he was Jewish, age forty-one, born in 1951: an age I found personally challenging and mysterious. After thirty-three years of being single, I had exhausted the ’64s, the ’62s, the ’58s and the ’57s. It was inevitable that I would get around to tasting the ’51s.
Musty, but with an oaky finish that unfolds nicely on the tongue. Good complexity. Stands up well into ’99. Drink now.

As an extra incentive, Michael was also convinced by Lesli to give me a ride home, except he didn’t, exactly. He meandered around San Francisco, hopelessly lost. I thought
at the time he was flirting, but now I know he was really lost; Michael couldn’t find his way out of a tunnel. As he careened from one irrevocable one-way street to another, we burrowed deep in conversation, braying at each other’s jokes with the enthusiasm of men and women who don’t know one another. I didn’t care what direction we were going, or if in fact the car was moving at all. We were having fun, and at thirty-three and forty-one, respectively, that was dangerous. At that stage in my life, I would kill for fun. I would lock a stranger in a car trunk and drive away laughing madly into the night, deciding against punching airholes.

He drove me back to my car, but then at the last moment he suggested we go for a drink, which seemed to only reinforce the idea that our real lives didn’t have to resume. Not while there was still a bar left open in San Francisco.

We sat across the marbled bar at Il Fornaio looking intently at one another, burning holes in each other’s eyes. We drank fine white wine in thin Italian goblets. We warmed to our topics. We spoke of William Burroughs and Robert Mapplethorpe and Barbara Kruger. We evoked the gods of apathy: Warhol. Capote. Updike. Kerouac. We bandied slivers of monologue by David Mamet and Spalding Gray. There was very little that could stop us as we went on to our stories of personal travel, engulfed in a cloud of blissful pretense. There should be a police force to govern the upwardly mobile and stop them when they get like this, when we start to believe that we are well read and well traveled and that knowledge is within reach. They should come up to you just as you’re sipping your Pinot Grigio and quoting Nabokov and they should hit you in the face with a bat. It really would be better for everyone concerned.