“My son is marrying Monica!” MJ proclaimed to everyone and anyone who would listen.
The next few months were a whirlwind of bliss.
For once, the man in her life was saying and doing exactly the right things. Without her having to prompt him! It was a miracle, Pandy exclaimed.
Indeed, she never tired of reminding people of the wondrous fact of Jonny. “I was convinced that since I’d been so lucky in my career, I didn’t deserve true love as well. I never dared to hope that I could have both; that true love could actually happen to me.” And on and on she went, proclaiming herself one of the converted. Love did conquer all, after all.
Once again, Pandy was the toast of the town. And so, too, was Monica. “Monica” was finally getting married.
There was only one person, it seemed, who disapproved. Henry was being a real Eeyore about the whole marriage, insisting that she and Jonny were sure to end up like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Pandy brushed this away, reminded of Jonny’s comment regarding Henry’s being old-fashioned.
And so, at ten o’clock on a cloudless morning in late September, Pandy and Jonny got married. The mayor performed the ceremony. Pandy wore a chic white lace suit with three-quarter-length sleeves and gorgeous white patent leather Mary Jane shoes. Then they all had a long, boozy lunch at Chou Chou.
Only sixty people were invited.
The wedding was exactly what MJ had promised it would be: small, discreet, intimate, and very meaningful.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PEOPLE ALWAYS said the first year of marriage was the hardest, but for Pandy and Jonny, the opposite was true.
There was the sex, of course. A wink, a stare, a nod of the head, and off they’d be, in the bathroom at a party or in the alley behind the restaurant. Once, they did it in the back of some billionaire’s car.
Sometimes it was shameful and downright tawdry. Like when the taxi driver made them get out of the cab. Afterward, they’d gone home and made love contritely, unable to look each other in the eye.
It was, as Pandy explained sheepishly to her friends, “One of those things. You try to stop, of course, because it’s so embarrassing. But then you can’t.”
“Is it unseemly?” she’d ask Jonny.
“Babe,” Jonny would reassure her, “they’re just jealous. We’ve got something they never will.”
This went on for weeks. Once again, Henry was not a fan. “You’re not writing,” he reminded her sharply. “You’ve written no new Monica pages since you got married.”
This was true, and Pandy didn’t know how to justify it. Jonny seemed to think he actually had married Monica, at least in the sense that he expected Pandy to stay out late with him several nights a week. He had yet to comprehend that in real life, “Monica” had to work. But it was too early in their marriage to disappoint him.
So she disappointed Henry instead.
“Monica, Monica, Monica,” she’d say with a sigh. “I’m so sick of Monica. Can’t I live my life as me for a moment?”
“Just give me twenty pages of Monica. Please,” Henry would beg.
And, feeling guilty, Pandy would promise to deliver pages by the end of the week.
But then her love for Jonny would once again get in the way, and forgetting about her promises to Henry, she’d put her energies into her husband instead.
For at last, just like in a fairy tale, after all those long years of uncertainty about marriage, career, and money, it seemed her life had actually worked out. Gone were the nights when she would wake at four a.m., tossing and turning and fretting about her future. Now, if she awoke at all, she’d feel the glorious heat from Jonny’s naked body and remember that all was well.
Indeed, even when they weren’t together, Jonny was like Peter Pan’s shadow, sewn onto her shoe by Wendy. She couldn’t shake him; at times it felt as if she had truly absorbed some of his molecules. She couldn’t pick up a lemon in the supermarket without wondering what Jonny would think of it; couldn’t pass a cute puppy on the street without wishing Jonny were there to admire it with her.
Of course, it wasn’t completely perfect.
There were some things they’d never be able to do together—like swim in the ocean. Jonny, it turned out, had never learned to swim, which seemed inexplicable to Pandy but perfectly reasonable to him. Lots of the kids he’d grown up with couldn’t swim—he hadn’t even seen a real pool until he was sixteen, when a hot older waitress had invited him for the weekend to her house in Hampton Bays.
Nor did they share similar tastes.
Jonny had come with a storage locker full of contemporary furniture, along with twenty or so plastic containers of his junk. The furniture was the kind of cheapish high-end box store stuff that a bachelor would buy, perhaps anticipating that when he married, he would get rid of it in deference to his wife’s tastes.
But Jonny didn’t want to part with one piece of it, and when Pandy asked him to and he refused, she realized she was already beginning to take on the dreaded “nagging wife” role. Vowing not to become a fishwife, she turned a blind eye to the furniture.
Unfortunately, what couldn’t be ignored were some of the matters of basic housekeeping. It turned out that along with his other masculine qualities, Jonny possessed that male propensity to completely overlook his own mess. You’d think with all the space in her loft, Jonny could have chosen one corner in which to dump his dirty laundry. But he couldn’t. Instead, he spread it all around like a dog marking his territory.
She’d tried scolding him, and once even picked up all his laundry and dumped it on his side of the bed. But Jonny feigned ignorance and lay down on top of it, making her feel that she was being petty. And so, instead of complaining, she reminded herself that love was about how you framed your partner in words. She decided that the words “Jonny” and “flaw” would never appear in the same sentence—even if that sentence was only in her mind. And so, when married friends expressed dismay with their husbands, Pandy affected a sort of astonishment, followed by the sentiment that she must be incredibly lucky, because Jonny was not like that at all.
This didn’t stop her from complaining to Henry, however.
“Does that dirty sock stuff still go on in marriages?” Henry asked over the phone. “How incredibly dull. How’s Monica coming?”
“I’m feeling a little boxed in,” Pandy said, eyeing a stack of plastic containers.
“Boxed in? How is that possible? You have nothing but space in that loft.”
“You know how men are. They come with stuff,” Pandy whined.
“Perhaps you should have considered that before you married him,” Henry said sharply.
“That’s not how a woman thinks when a man—a man like Jonny, by the way—says he’s in love with her and wants to get married,” Pandy replied.
Henry laughed. “My god, girl. What has happened to your brain?”
Little did Pandy know that she would soon be asking herself this very question.
Jonny wanted a restaurant-quality kitchen in the apartment, and Pandy agreed. She wanted him to be happy; after all, he was Jonny Balaga, the world-famous chef. Of course they must have one.
She assumed that the term meant high-end appliances. Only when the plans were drawn did she understand that for Jonny, “restaurant-quality kitchen” meant the kind of kitchen you would find in an actual restaurant.