Mergers and Acquisitions, page 24
I chose not to worry about it and left that detail to my parents. I did a lot of that, those thirteen months. I also left a lot of the bills to them, and most of the logistics. My mom had come strong out of the gate with wedding plans after we got engaged, and beware, the person who tried to distract her, which included me. So I listened, and I cried, and the year passed quickly as we came to the edge of Laurie Colwin’s dark forest, which might hold the worst we could imagine, or the best.
* * *
* * *
Our wedding day broke early for me. I didn’t sleep the night before, consumed with nerves and wonder and jitters. I watched the sun rise into a gray dawn that didn’t portend well for our outdoor ceremony at the home of a long-dead American president, complete with slave quarters rebuilt for educational purposes. I forced down an English muffin with marmalade, and it felt like sandpaper. But I went along with the morning. I took a bath in the claw-foot tub, carefully shaving my legs, leaving my armpits for just before the ceremony. I laid out my underpinnings and jewelry: blue lacy underwear, an armored tank of a strapless bra, the aquamarine earrings that Michael had given me the night before as a wedding present. I gave him bookends of the marble lions at the New York Public Library. The library’s lions stood guard over our first kiss and, I figured, Patience and Fortitude would be necessary as we faced what might come.
And then Mark called.
“He isn’t missing,” I told Erin as we left for our hair appointment. “He was drunk last night, so he’s probably hungover somewhere. Where the fuck is Carlos?”
It was a good question. Erin called him.
“Carlos? Where the fuck are you?” she yelled into the phone, while Michael’s very Christian aunt piloted her rental Lincoln to the salon. Her daughter Marie was my junior bridesmaid and, at twelve, possessed more poise than I could ever claim. “I’m going to cut you if you don’t find Michael.”
I hit her on the leg and gestured to Carole and Marie, who were staring at us in the rearview mirror, aghast.
Erin paused, listening to Carlos. And then she started to laugh. “Why are you in a hot tub?”
A hot tub? I mouthed to her. She made a gagging face. “OK, so Mark and Jack are worried that Michael ran off, so can you call them and let them know that you’re in the hot tub? Thanks.”
She hung up the phone. “They’re in the hot tub? Like, the hot tub in the hotel?” I asked.
“Yeah. So, Michael’s a bit”—she glanced at Carole—“hungover, and Carlos thought he’d feel better if he got in the hot tub, so they’re there in the hotel, and Mark and Jack just didn’t think to look there, apparently.”
Carole started laughing. “Sometimes men just don’t know where to look.”
I immediately wanted to run to Michael with some ginger ale and an aspirin. “Can you imagine being hungover in a hot tub! All those swirling jets, and he has the worst stomach. He’s just cooking himself.”
“I think that right now, that is not your problem,” Carole said. “He got himself into it, and it’s Carlos’s job to fix it. Right now, you need to get your hair done.”
I sat back into the cream leather of the seats. Erin started laughing. “Dude, I am so glad I’m not Carlos right now. I hope Michael doesn’t puke in the hot tub.”
The rest of the day floated by. A woman named Sonam forced my hair into an updo, and my exhausted, wonderful mother showed up with my dress at four o’clock. My friends helped me into it, pinning my brown ribbon sash into an intricate bow, and putting toupee tape on my shoulders so my straps wouldn’t slip. My bridesman, Jake, drove us to the ceremony, and as we wound our way up the mountain, the clouds cleared.
Here’s the thing I didn’t mention before. One afternoon in Washington, right before I moved to New York, I got an email from Michael about something, I forget what— probably more flirting thinly disguised as a work request. But as I typed out a response, I started thinking about who this guy was, and who he could be: was he a friend, someone I could talk to when, inevitably, things went south with Adnan? I liked his emails, and I liked that he seemed to know me and wanted to know more, even just through our email volleys. I thought about this. And then a thunderbolt came down to earth and burned itself into my skull, and I realized something as true as the earth’s curve: I was going to marry this guy.
So I did. We met under the ash trees at five o’clock. Michael wore a bespoke gray suit that hewed closely to his slender body. I remembered our first unofficial date, when I saw him naked onstage, and it felt like a million years ago. I was more familiar with that body now. I couldn’t tell if he was hungover, or nervous, or joyous, and as we joined hands, I realized he was all those things; he was, in fact, everything.
Our friend Dave, the columnist, led us down the bridal path, and we said our vows in front of 114 people who remain our whole world. Then the skies opened, and we dashed for the reception in the covered pavilion. It poured; we ate cake; we danced, and danced, and drank, and danced some more. We crawled into bed at two a.m. after a stop at the dive bar across the street, where my friend Charlie—on whom I had a crush in 1992—got me exactly what I needed: the world’s largest glass of water. We finally made a run for it through the rain back to our room, where we made happy, fast, exhausted love before Michael rubbed my aching feet and removed the thirty-two bobby pins from my hair. And then we rolled over on our sides, held hands, and drifted into marriage together.
I didn’t need the world to know about this love. Neither Michael nor I cared if it was officially “announced” or not. But the next morning, we got a text from friends who were already on their way back to New York. It was a picture of our wedding announcement from a copy purchased at the airport Starbucks. So maybe I did feel a twinge of pride to see us written up in the Times after all. We were in the middle of the first page. We laughed, packed our bags, and headed out toward the airport and the life ahead of us.
We’d made it. And I knew that he was worth it. We were worth it.
Epilogue
The State of the Union
So, what happened next? We boarded a plane to Barbados, then a smaller one to Bequia, a tiny island in the Caribbean, where we stared at the blue water for a week and didn’t try to make sense of anything other than where to go for dinner. We drank a lot of rum, wandered among the goats on the island, and brushed dried seaweed off our feet in the evenings, all the while letting the thing we’d just done permeate our salty skin, fill the air in our lungs, weld itself into our DNA. The Commonwealth of Virginia, and the New York Times, had declared that we were married. So we were.
On the penultimate day of our honeymoon, Michael got a rotten ear infection, so Mr. Gideon took us in his red truck taxi down to the pharmacy in Port Elizabeth, where we got a dropper bottle of Cipro for a few Caribbean dollars. That night, as we drew out the last dinner before returning home, the hotel cats purred and rubbed themselves against our legs. I drank too much wine, and we took a midnight walk on the sand, the waves mimicking the pounding in Michael’s head. It was time to go home, to just be married.
The next morning, we boarded the tiny island hopper back to Barbados, and Michael laid his head in my lap as we tipped up into the sky. The cabin wasn’t pressurized, and the closer we got to our cruising altitude of five thousand feet, the more miserable he was. He closed his eyes, and I could feel his shoulders twitch, his body relaxing into a fitful sleep.
We picked up some passengers at the airstrip on Canouan, and the pilots turned the plane toward Barbados and home. I watched the Caribbean float by below us, and my mind wandered to what the weather was like back in New York. It was the first week of May; I knew the tulips on Park Avenue would be in full bloom. We would start sleeping with the windows open again, and the horses at Kensington Stables, just behind our building, would neigh us awake in the morning. I needed to place a grocery order, or maybe we should just order Mexican food and deal with groceries later. I wondered if we had any wedding presents waiting for us at the post office, and whether we had coffee at home. The details of our life swam back into place, hazily and lazily, as the plane floated its way northeast to Bridgetown.
And then I felt a jolt. I am not the world’s happiest flier, and the more I’ve done it over the years, the more nervous I tend to get. I board each flight mourning the fact that my luck has finally run out, which made a turbulent thirteen-hour crossing to Australia particularly miserable. Like many nervous fliers, I pay attention to the engines, and I know conclusively that only I will be able to hear the exact second when they’ve sputtered their last, just before 250 people and God knows how many suitcases and animals in the hold will be plunged into the darkest depths of the ocean. I use my clenched body to will the engines to keep going, minute after minute, even if it’s just a thirty-minute hop from D.C. to New York. When I was younger, I flew free and easy, but not so much now. If I don’t pay attention to the engines, then they will stop, and everyone on the plane will die. Of this I remain firmly convinced.
But on that plane five thousand feet over the water, I really did feel a jolt, and then a sudden silence. We were sitting right behind the pilots, who had been chatting amiably over the drone of the props. The jolt snapped them out of their conversation, and they stopped talking and looked at the dashboard, where a red light on the dashboard had started to blink. The first officer whacked at one of the dials with his index finger. The props, it seemed, had stopped spinning, and this plane, carrying the pilots, us, and a lovely Canadian family who had loaned us twenty Caribbean dollars for the exit tax, was about to ditch into the ocean. My stomach dropped right down into the water. This was it; it was not a drill. I was going to die with my husband’s head in my lap, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I looked down at Michael’s newly tanned face, his noble slope of a nose, his beard that had gone rogue over the week on Bequia. I thought: I should wake you before we nose-dive. I should kiss you once more. Whither thou goest, I will go, right down to the bottom of the Caribbean. I looked around at the rest of the passengers, and no one else had noticed what was going on. What was wrong with them? I screamed in my head; how could they not know they were all about to die? I swerved back to the pilots, who were doing things I didn’t understand, but all with an air of holy shit.
And then just as quickly as the silence had begun, it stopped. The props roared right back into action, and the cabin filled again with their buzz. The pilots calmed their hands, looked at each other, and shrugged. They shrugged. I hooked my trembling hands onto the luggage rack above, the only place I could find to put them where I wouldn’t disturb Michael. I calculated how long the engines had stopped: Three seconds? Five seconds? Ten hours? Long enough to worry the pilots and me, but a fraction of time otherwise. A blip at the end of a trip, and the beginning of a marriage. I sometimes wonder if those few seconds on that plane actually happened, or are they just a part of a fever dream? But they were absolutely real, and I can still taste the bile that rose in my throat when I saw everything about to break apart, five hundred miles from home.
I found the altimeter on the dashboard and didn’t take my eyes off it until we were wheels down full stop in Barbados, where the landing bumps shook Michael out of his sleep. He studied me curiously as we gathered our things. “Are you OK?” he asked, as I rushed into the terminal, away from that plane, unable to say anything. “Fine, I just need to pee,” I mumbled. I decided I wouldn’t tell him what had happened until we were safely back in Brooklyn, in our messy apartment with the piles of mail, the windowsills filthy with pollution off Ocean Parkway, the life that please, God, I’d keep on living with him. We found our flight to New York, and I drank my way back up the East Coast, my face still blanched, and my hands unwilling to let his go.
* * *
So, we got married. And the rest of it—well, it’s just a different ball game. You may be surprised to know, given our baseline combative state, that we landed in a happy marriage, even with all the twists and turns that came before. But a happy marriage, even just a mostly happy marriage, isn’t as interesting as the drama in the early innings. You play on, round the bases, run home, and hope, oddly, that it goes into extra innings. With luck and care, it does, and soon you find that the teams that once faced off to win are now in it together.
It’s a funny thing how it happens, though. Assuming you make it back from your honeymoon alive and intact, you spend the first couple of months reliving the wedding, prodding your friends and families for the wedding stories and gossip you missed because you were too busy hugging everyone, cutting the cake, adjusting your dress. Here’s one I missed: a dear friend who’d brought her new boyfriend as her plus-one got so drunk that they basically humped each other on the shuttle ride back to Charlottesville. I would not have found this remarkable—get it where and when you can, I say—but for the fact that my work colleagues asked me who that was, and wondered whether they could have waited until the children got off the bus.
Here’s another: my dad’s sister was so determined to attend this wedding that she made the five-hour drive in her beat-up Toyota Tercel with her seventy-eight-year-old veteran diabetic husband, who could barely breathe on his own, and then left him at the Hampton Inn, preferring to party by herself. She shut down the reception.
Anyway, all this stuff comes out, you write the thank-you notes and marvel at your newly kitted-out kitchen, and then life just kind of goes on. Your mom stops calling as much; there are no more floral emergencies or questions about table settings that need to be answered right then. Your aunts start asking your mom about when you’ll have a baby, which she ignores, but quietly wonders. You chum up with your other long-partnered or married friends, preferring in some way the company of those who have been through it, who know what it means to choose the same person day after day, who have faced the meaning of forever and decided that they’re OK with that. The people who have committed.
You swim through the first year of marriage not unlike the first year of parenthood; getting to the first anniversary, the first candle on the cake, feels like a feat of untold strength, of besting a tide you didn’t expect. I’m not quite sure why. For Michael and me, it marked our sixth full year together. It wasn’t like we didn’t know each other; I mean, Jesus. But just like the year of our engagement, the first year of our marriage was a challenge unlike any other. We pushed against each other during the day, even as we sought each other out in the night. We got a dog, and I took hours-long walks with her in Prospect Park, all of a sudden in desperate need of the solitude among the throngs. But over the months, even with the push and pull, we learned to navigate each other as husband and wife, as legal or life partners, whatever you want to call it; as friends and lovers for the back of beyond, for Friday night fights and Sunday morning lie-ins, weddings and funerals and all the rest of it.
No one ever knows the interiors of another’s marriage, and marital bliss always comes with an asterisk. The bliss that we found lay in the idea of the permanent and the possible. It took almost a year to relax into each other again, but somewhere around March, at the eleven-month mark, we felt ourselves flying. Outside our walls, things were changing: we both took on bigger roles at work, and we learned how to pair the headiness of ambition with the sublime calm of home. I didn’t return to the Weddings desk. What I’d seen in New Orleans and on my Neediest Cases assignments pushed me toward a different kind of journalism than the one I’d become so comfortable in. So I moved down to the main news desks permanently. I worked as a research assistant for a national columnist, edited political stories and dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent long hours on an overnight desk shift, where I felt unprecedented—and completely false—power as the only employee in the newsroom at three a.m., except for the creepy janitor with bad taste in music. Michael joined the copy desk and unlocked his talent as an editor on the Metro desks. Things just got better and better.
Right before our second anniversary, we bought a weekend cabin in the Catskills. To my mind, this felt like the correct next step as card-carrying members of the creative class. We didn’t have the down payment for a half-million-dollar two-bedroom fixer-upper in Windsor Terrace, but we could afford a small mortgage on an escape from the city. We spent nearly every Friday evening speeding up the New York State Thruway to Route 17B, Eleanor the mutt panting from panic in the back seat of our purple Honda. We filled our little place with Craigslist finds and IKEA necessities and immediately spent thousands on the ancient stone chimney that was, to our great dismay, falling off the side of the house. We lolled for hours on the screened-in porch and took Eleanor for long meanders around the lake, watching for snakes and bears. It was heavenly.
And then one cool evening in June, I was changing clothes in the bedroom, and Michael sneaked up on me and gently tweaked one of my breasts, as he was, and is, wont to do. It felt like someone had hit me in the boob with a canoe paddle. “Get off me!” I yelled, grabbing my chest.
“Sorry!” He jumped back in surprise; that wasn’t my normal reaction. I wondered what that was all about, and then thought: Ohh, fucking hell.
The next evening, I stopped on the way home from the gym and bought a pack of pregnancy tests. I didn’t keep them in the house, and this gynecologist had assured me six years before that I’d need help getting pregnant anyway, so I wasn’t worried about it. That was perhaps the wrong way to proceed, as anyone who has played Russian roulette may attest. I peed on the First Response stick and put it on the sink, peeled off my spandex to get in the shower, and looked back at the test, which had developed a big fat double magenta line in about five seconds. Ohhh, fuck me. Michael got home right as I got out of the shower, and my whole body shook as I walked into the kitchen to tell him the news. “I guess that’s what we’re doing now,” I said, and he sat down on the couch and laughed.
