Otherwise Engaged (8 page)

We sat by ourselves and drank a bottle of Newcastle ale and ate the package of Turtles I put in his stocking. I gave him two and ate one.

I praised the newfound site. I have learned not to let talent go unrecognized.

“Just keep steering the conversation back to them,” is what my mother says. I will never liberate her and have almost stopped wanting to. Having survived the first quarter of my engagement, I now recognize her twenty-five-year marriage to my stepfather, Don, as something impossible and skilled, like spoon bending.

• • •

I had my first in-line roller-skating lesson today, on my new skates which Michael gave me for Christmas. He ran alongside, a human training wheel, as I slipped and slid my way down Presidio Street in front of our flat. We went back and forth, his hands clutched in mine.

“I’ve got you,” he said. “You can’t fall.”

I have the sense of going back in time, and correcting things.

R
euben said yesterday that there was something vague about me. I came in and said I was fine and that things were fine and he said, “Yes, but there’s something.” Then he frowned at my head, as though looking for where the bolts went.

I relayed the fact that, in ten months and seventeen days, I would be married. I described how I find this fact pleasing, in the abstract.

“What’s alarming now,” I said to him, “is whenever I notice anything about Michael, I hear the striking of a Chinese gong and the words
FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
echo through my head.”

“Like what?” he asked, far too interested.

“Like the way hair grows on his earlobes,” I said. I wished I could clearly see Reuben’s ears, but I couldn’t. We just weren’t ever going to get that close.

Then he said, “I notice that when you talk about your anxiety, you keep fiddling with your engagement ring.”

I’m like, Jesus, old man, give me a break.

I denied everything, of course. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there thinking, When are you going to tell him about ———, and then my mind says, Oh no. That would really be bad. You can’t tell him about how you and Michael have been sparring, how you sometimes look at him and he becomes a potato bug. You can’t tell him how terrified you are of keeping up at work with the twenty-year-olds named Ian, of the Creative Director from L.A., of getting fired and becoming a person with good shoes and a blanket over your shoulder who walks around cradling a Styrofoam cup of coffee. You can’t tell him that. That would make all of this real. It would make me a person with problems, who goes to see a therapist.

This goes on for the first forty-five minutes, then we work backward from there. By the last five minutes of the session I am talking very fast, like I’m doing speedballs. Talking about everything I’ve avoided. I can’t make much progress, so I spill my guts.

In the “Traditions” column of
Modern Bride
, it says that on your wedding day you’re supposed to have something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. The something old is supposed to be the garter from a happily married woman.

I know few happily married women. Those I do know don’t wear garter belts. I store this away as information.

I decide my something old will be the ring charm I pulled out of Michael’s friends Bill and Mia’s wedding cake during
the period when Michael and I were in the final throes of the Commitment Wars. We went to four weddings last summer, while I waited in vain for Michael to voluntarily propose. By the last one I couldn’t breathe. A clubfoot, watching the women in white. Sobbing quietly and uncontrollably into Michael’s handkerchief.

“I always cry at weddings,” I said. Yes, but do you always hyperventilate? one may well have asked.

Mia had a white cake draped with tea roses, and inside were charms. I pulled one out, fastened onto a long white silk ribbon. It was a tiny engagement solitaire ring charm. I remember when I pulled it out of the cake, Mia, who looks like Deborah Kerr, said, “Don’t show it to Michael, he’ll have a stroke.”

I did show it to him, and he stared at it like a blind man.

Dusty called to tell me he is buying a three-ton Chevy truck.

I said, “What are you going to do with a three-ton truck in Manhattan?”

“Drive it around,” he says. He makes it sound like entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

“I have to fill the void,” he says. “The void is really huge today.”

I recognize that voice. It’s his manic voice.

“Don’t even think about another dog,” I say.

Dusty has had five dogs, all of whom he ended up giving away. He lives in a studio apartment on Third Avenue. He’s like a Satanist with those damn dogs.

“I’m on the other line with a credit broker,” he says. “I have to call you back.”

“No truck, Dusty,” I say. “I disallow it.”

“All right,” he says. He sounds gleeful. I know he is lying.

“Go buy some penny candy instead,” I say. “A big bag. Or, I know, go to Kmart.”

They have a Kmart in the East Village now. It’s doing blockbusters. Finally, people who live in New York City can get big jugs of Wisk.

“You can buy anything in Kmart,” I say.

“What does Michael say?” he asks. Hoping for the stray electoral vote. He needs California and Michigan.

“I’m with the penny candy,” Michael says.

“You guys are just perfect for each other,” Dusty says, disgusted.

“Promise me you won’t buy the truck,” I say.

“All right,” he says. “I love you. You’re always so right.”

“Bullshit,” I say. “I’m watching you.”

Received a memo today.

“… I want to ensure that we are casting
visible
Jamaicans and/or African-Americans in our advertising. My sense is that we don’t cast obviously diverse talent in adequate numbers.”

No more invisible people. Right.

The mistake is to read the memos, of course. It’s just a way that crazy people can touch you. You really have to be like Ram Dass, who keeps a picture of Jesse Helms right next to his maharaja on his puja table, and says, “It’s all perfect.”

Meanwhile I shored up my courage and cracked the January issue. I am seriously behind on my
Modern Bride
checklist. I have practically nothing checked off.

I can feel failure gathering in a fat cloud around my head. I know I could apply myself and do well, but I don’t see how it’s going to prepare me for real life.

We were on the couch and Michael was stroking my face and he said, “There have been two women in my life with beautiful eyebrows. One was the Wicked Queen in
Snow White
. The other is you.”

He went on to say that if the Wicked Queen were around today, the whole story might have been different, because she would have looked in her Magic Mirror and said, “If I got a little laser work around the jaw and eyelids, I might still be considered the Fairest in the Land.”

Michael and I attended his boss’s wedding last night. Seven hundred people, Grace Cathedral. It made the society page.

She wore Vera Wang, with the most wonderful satiny train and sculpted bow in back. It would have been better not to have seen this dress. This dress will do its best to ruin any dress I happen to end up with.

She glided down the aisle, which had long white tapered candles on the ends of all the pews. An angelic choir was singing into the high-ceilinged cathedral, which was draped with huge bouquets of French white tulips. We should definitely elope, I mused. Get the fuck out of Dodge.

The reception was at the Olympic Club. We waded through the sea of flat-faced white women with tiny noses and caved-in necks, holding aloft long flutes of Veuve Clicquot. In a side parlor, men smoked cigars with the
satisfied expressions of sharks. Doorbell-like buttons lined the wall, to summon the expressionless Hispanic men who bore trays of fine brandy.

Willie Brown was there at the buffet, thronged by the flat-faced women. As I watched them fawn over him, I dipped a jumbo shrimp into blood-red sauce. I picked a pantied lamb chop off the buffet. There were whole roast beefs and turkeys, caviar, dim sum, two sushi bars, smoked salmon, dozens of pâtés. Pasta prepared as you waited, with a variety of sauces in silver boats.

“What’s going to happen to all of this later?” I asked Michael as he surveyed the cheese assortment. In its leering abundance it looked not so much like food but nuclear waste. I wanted to make sure it would be properly disposed of.

Caterers, Michael explained, always give away food to the homeless shelters. He was eating a plate of thinly sliced Norwegian lox as he said this, with mini-bagels.

It was hard to imagine that the beluga would make its way to the Mission, to the man on the street with skin the color of yams. Hard to imagine how exactly the yam man would benefit from the raw-oyster bar.

We left early. An Ethiopian valet brought my car around, I gave him five dollars. What I should have done was given him my car, and then had him run us both over. Death to the hypocrites.

Today the Creative Director from L.A. came by to tell Graham and me that our television campaign had tested well in the initial focus groups, and would definitely be produced. He announced it dismissively, as though it were a prelude to
something much, much bigger created by himself which he would at any moment reveal.

He was in my office for about five minutes, but wouldn’t sit down. He methodically picked up things from my desk, glanced at them, and put them down again. I offered him a chair. He declined, examining a stapler. He of course had probably never used a stapler. He had people to staple for him. As I started to rise, he ran out. I thought of how kings have to have their heads higher than everyone else’s.

When I left the building to go home, the Hostess pie and cake truck was out front, loading snack cakes into Kwick Mart. I looked to see if the driver was fat. He was.

Everyone is being their perfect selves.

I torture Michael when we’re watching television; I take my diamond ring off and place it on his baby finger or his little toe. I put it on the Cow’s tail. Michael hates this, so he finally grabs it away from me and jams it back on my ring finger.

This makes me feel like he’s asking me all over again. A feeling that time can slide backward and forward, that we can afford to dawdle.

At 6 a.m. the alarm went off, on my side of the bed. I told Michael that I was taking a day trip to L.A. to attend the final focus groups for the new campaign: what Graham calls the Fuck Us Groups. This is where, for fifty dollars apiece, people from all walks of life sit around eating free sandwiches and ripping the wings off the advertising we have created.

“I’m leaving for L.A.,” I said.

Michael scowled, flopped over, and said, “You have to tell me the day before.”

“Why?” I said.

“I need to prepare for your flying. I need to fly the plane with my mind.”

I hear myself agreeing to this.

Back home, a Saturday. I went to my childhood friend Yvonne’s baby shower in Pacific Heights. Immediately upon arrival I was cornered by a petite blond woman from Yvonne’s office who’d just left her husband. When she heard I was engaged, she explained to me, in detail, how love dies. Smiling and hovering like Tinkerbell, she described how one day she just woke up and realized she didn’t love her husband anymore. Her two-year-old son, she said, is living with her in Mill Valley.

Then she said I should read
The Road Less Traveled.

Eventually I was saved by the appearance of an eggplant frittata. I moved toward it. I told her it was very nice to meet her. And thank you for killing my buzz.

I left early, making up a lie for the room. Yvonne understood, knowing my history of mental illness.

I walked alone down Washington Street. The maids were all leaving the Broadway mansions, walking to the bus stops, to crinkled American cars that don’t fit in.

I hate showers. All those women in one place. Terrifying.

I wonder whom I can convince to throw me one.

I tell Reuben about the dream I had, where the back of my wedding dress has a big hole in the rear.

He said, “How did that make you feel?”

“Exposed,” I said.

He nods, and says, “When the Navajo weave their blankets, they put a mistake in every one. Because nothing is perfect.

“A very smart people,” he concludes, putting his feet up on a hassock, and crossing them at the ankles.

At work the person in the office next to me has been made a partner. His commercials consistently feature pouty-lipped Asian girls in midriff tops and lean yet muscular men with lizard eyes just like his.

We started at the same time, in this agency. Like, the same month.

And when I pass him in his new giant-sized office, with a wet bar and a black marble shower, I have to fucking
congratulate
him.

Last night I made Oprah’s unfried spa recipe chicken. I have to make it every two weeks now. Michael insists. He feels it’s part of his compensation package.

The addition of hot mango chutney made it even more diabolical. We each ate about five pieces.

I am no longer losing weight.

They had a catered cocktail party for the lizard man. Inside his new top-floor corner office is all-new furniture from Lim. The chairs have soft, faux zebra backs. One of those really expensive desks with the black trip wire and no drawers.

I comfort myself with the conviction that he is probably, way down deep inside, profoundly unhappy. I tell myself that he is secretly terrified, just skating on his luck. Because he knows that others possess a higher sense of originality and style, even though he is doing way better careerwise and everyone in the Fuck Us Groups seems to love his work. On the
surface.

I drink a single glass of champagne. I smile, feeling the burn. I can’t get over the fact that the lizard man is winning.

It’s the Chinese who say, Envy is an insult to the self.

I told Reuben how I wanted a raise and a promotion, how everybody is passing me on the ladder and how upset that makes me. I admitted that I was obsessed with ambition and money and getting recognized by the agency, how I wanted it all now. The desk with no drawers, everything.