“Are you okay to drive?” I said.
“You have to know, I pray for you every day,” he said. “Then again, I prayed for him. Let’s get out of here.”
“Will you see Mom before you go back?”
“I’ve prayed about that too,” he said. “But I think my family needs me home.”
“Wait—you have kids?”
“Well. In a couple of months. A little boy, they’re saying.”
“That’s great—I mean I’m happy for you. Does Mom know?”
“You can tell her. Let her know that this one’s wanted.”
—
But back to this man I was about to marry—I don’t know if I’m really getting his appeal across to you. If he played music with men half his age—and there was no “if” about it—he didn’t play rock and roll, and he hadn’t bought a motorcycle. If he drank every day—and he did—he’d take care to feed the cat in the afternoon when he felt a big night coming on. (It took a while to get what he meant by “feed the cat.” Repulsive, yes. But hilarious, no? Yet I never heard him say “cunt,” though I said it often enough.) And he was never a mean drunk—okay, he did put my poor first husband through some shit when he took us to dinner that time, but I give him a pass for that. He called a perfume a scent, a chauffeur a driver—not that he’d ever had one—his studio a workroom, an author a writer. He claimed not to have watched television since Nixon resigned—I think I was thirteen—and this was probably more or less true, except that he didn’t count baseball. He allowed the radio—by which he meant public radio—only while driving. He could always guess the Piano Puzzler on Performance Today. The news and talk shows he called “bien-pensant agitprop”: the world, he said, was not ceaselessly fascinating, and all things need not be considered. When Bill Clinton’s voice came on, he jabbed for the mute button; later, he’d do the same with Bush. After 9/11, he drew a design for a new World Trade Center and had me put it up on the Web: a giant replica of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. That would have stirred up a hoo-hah, if anyone had known his name anymore. But he convinced himself that this was why Bard College had given the commission for its new concert hall to Frank Gehry, so fuck Leon Botstein—if he wanted Gehry to be his fucking Albert Speer…and so on. Largely the single malt talking.
When I first moved in with him, he said, “Will you still goose me while you’re changing my Depends?”
“Depends,” I said.
“Well said.” This was before people started saying “Well played.” “But how about this? We’ll buy them in bulk—so much Depends upon a red wheel barrow.”
Okay, I haven’t convinced you, and obviously the Frank Gehry thing doesn’t show him to advantage. But even my mother was sold—and if you want to think I was bought, fine, but that’s not how it felt.
—
The day my divorce became final—I’d been living with him for a little over a year—he took me to the Beekman Arms. “I hope you don’t mind my being blunt,” he said. “We don’t need to have this conversation again, but you do realize that things could get a little unattractive in the homestretch.”
“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said. “I could get cancer, and you’d have to pretend you were still hot for me. No boobs, no hair…”
“Maybe I’d like you better—you know my peculiarities. Still, the odds are in my favor, no? So—how to put this—if and when you should feel the need for more congenial company, do try to hide it a little better than you did with Young Lochinvar. But I’d be forever grateful if you could see your way clear to sticking around for the last act, in whatever capacity—well, of course not forever grateful. Okay, there. How’s that for a tender marriage proposal?”
I put my glass down. “That’s what this is?”
“All right, I knew I was getting too poetic,” he said. “I’d better just assume the position.” He stood up, went down on one knee beside my chair and took my hand. The people at the next table looked, then looked away.
“Good Christ,” I said. “We’re really doing this?”
“I think we’d be fine,” he said. “We could still pretend to be illicit—we’ll get you a pair of those heart-shaped sunglasses. Do you need some time?”
I shook my head. “I’d just start to think.”
“Never a good idea.” He kissed my hand and went back to his chair. “This calls for champagne. Joke, joke. Here.” He raised his glass of scotch. “To the loveliest widow in the Hudson Valley—in the far-distant future.” He took a sip and reached down to rub his knee. “I’m really not coldhearted, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t think I am either.”
“Well,” he said. “That part is your business.”
—
So, a month later I was taking that shower, on the morning I was to be married for the second time, in the bath off the master bedroom, while he was getting dressed on the other side of the wall. I came out in a towel—he had the biggest, softest white towels, though maybe that was to his ex-wife’s credit—with makeup and hair just right, as he was knotting his ironic bow tie. Not a clip-on: I was about to marry a man who knew how to do this. I saw him see me in the mirror. “Hmm,” he said. “You know, they can’t start without us.” Was I not being prompted to pull out an end of his tie with my teeth? Grrr—c’mere, Tiger.
—
We had the wedding downstairs in the living room, with white orchids on the Guatemalan coffee table. I’d just wanted the two of us to go to the town clerk, but he insisted we invite some family—“to keep things on the up and up”—and find a Unitarian Universalist clergyperson to do a plain-Jane service: no scripture, no music, no e. e. cummings. His parents were long dead, but his brother, whom I’d never met, said he’d drive up from the city. His daughter told him she’d booked a flight from Portland, but she called the morning she was to leave and said she’d woken up with an ear infection and couldn’t lift her head from the pillow. Okay, you did hear of this happening. My mother came up the night before and stayed at the house, and my brother flew in with his wife and their one-year-old. We had room for them too, and my mother claimed she wanted to reconnect with my brother, meet the wife and spend time with the grandchild she’d never seen. But he told me that he and his wife had prayed about sleeping under the same roof with a still-unmarried couple, and while he didn’t judge, he needed to be a servant leader in his family and it was best for them to live their values. We offered to put them up at the Beekman Arms, but they’d booked a room at a Motel 6 and would drive over in the morning.
He showed up an hour before the ceremony—we’d just come downstairs, and I could feel still-premarital slime in the crotch of my underwear—with the bossy little big-breasted wife holding the kid, who was sucking his thumb. “Your brother’s told me all about you,” she said. “And this is Zacharias. He’s a little shy. Well, congratulations.” Did she not know you don’t congratulate the bride? “I hope you’ll be very happy.” What a cunt. My brother brought her over to my mother, who did her kissy-cheek thing, then held him at arms’ length as if in reverent examination. “Look at you,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.” No shit.