Jane knew after their first night together in her place on Broome Street that she wanted to marry him. She wanted a quick, unannounced ceremony in some place with no connections to either of them. Partly because she found that scenario much more romantic than dressing up like a cupcake and proceeding to do exactly what billions of couples had done before. But her main reason was to escape her parents who would, without fail, envelop the whole event in the usual murk of pointless grief and disapproval. She saw all this clearly after having woken up before him, rolling over on her side, and, supporting herself on her elbow, looking at him in the dust-laden light. She examined his face with its faint gray shadow around the mouth and chin but deep in childish sleep. A long, slender arm stuck out from under the blanket. His fingers twitched. They had none of the repulsiveness of other men’s fingers.
He woke when she was on her way to the bathroom.
“You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
She sank down on the bed next to him.
“I should be off to a Sigma Theta Lambda meeting.”
“What for?”
“What for? I’ve said I’ll be there, silly. That’s why.”
They both smoked. In bed. Looking back on it ten years later, it seemed like a ritual from a lost past, as distant as duels with pistols or mummification.
“But you don’t actually want to join a student soc talking shop.”
“How do you know?”
“You dislike all that stuff. Basically, you don’t want to be a member of anything.”
“Don’t I?”
“No. You’d like to get out of it. But it worries you to think that not joining in will make you into a sad, lonely person.”
“The things you know.”
“But all true?”
Jane was twenty-two years old. She was still not sure what kind of person she was. “But, well…”
“Now you don’t need to worry about being sad and lonely any more,” Greg said and caressed her cheek.
And so, with an untroubled conscience, she did what she truly wanted to do, which was to be on her own or with Greg, busy writing, studying, drifting around New York or being indoors looking out over the big city, or going out for drinks to merge into the crowd, maybe two to three times a month.
Greg was not particularly involved in student life either, even though he was far more of an extrovert than Jane. He was one of those rare people who is just as much at ease chatting with gang members as passing the time of day with an old lady and making her chortle. He played in a band.
Until she met Greg, Jane had been lonely. Lonely as an only child, lonely hanging out with Alice and other girls, lonely going out with boys who made it seem like they were listening while all their attention was in their pawing hands. College had saved her from the dreariness of the Midwest, and literature from the sensation of being somehow locked into her own head. In Greg she had found the first person with whom she could connect strongly. It felt like having searched radio frequencies all alone for twenty-two years before finding a voice at last.
With him, she did things she had never done with her old boyfriends back in Wisconsin.
“Oh-la-la…” Alice said when Jane told her this.
Jane had to explain.
“Not that kind of thing. Or, yes. That, too. But what I really meant was things like sitting on a moth-eaten sofa listening while he practices with his band. When he went back to La Crosse for his uncle’s funeral, I had to keep sniffing at a T-shirt he had left behind.”
After a month with Greg, she met his parents. He had told her in advance that they were much like her own mother and father: tedious, cold, loveless. The weekend in New York with Peggy and John Noland made Jane wonder what other features of their life together Greg had hyped up for her. Not that it really mattered; she took his wanting to be more like her as an incomprehensible but tremendous compliment.
John, Greg’s father, was a jovial, bearded man who wrote books on local history. He spent weekends and holidays reenacting Civil War battles in the company of other jovial, bearded men. He had rigged up a real cannon on his driveway and fired it once a year where it stood, regardless of any local police permission. He was also a pacifist. He had fought in Vietnam and learned a thing or two about people, as he said. Peggy had been Miss Teen Colorado and later kicked up a lot of controversy by stating in public that beauty competitions were not only bad news for women in general but also gave the master of ceremonies opportunities to fiddle with underage girls. The only conceivably tedious side of Peggy and John Noland was that they owned and ran a company trading in spare parts for agricultural machinery. As for loveless, this seemed to apply exclusively in the physical sense. At a lunch in Central Park, they spoke openly about their plan to divorce when Greg had started school. This had been postponed because of the children, and, having reached the last milestone when Greg’s little brother Jeff moved out, they had become so accustomed to their platonic marriage that they could not imagine another kind of relationship.
“Anyway, we are working together,” Peggy explained.
“Sex, now, we’ve forgotten what it’s about,” John added. He glanced at Greg. “I hope there’s no more you’ll need to ask on the subject, son.”
“We sure couldn’t help you with that kind of thing,” Peggy said.
Then they laughed so loudly people at the tables around them turned and stared.
This was who they were, Peggy and John Noland. They had a lot to do with Greg being who he was. More than before, Jane dreaded him meeting her parents; their eccentricities were the opposite of fun. Also, they were older than his parents: she had been their longed-for child, a late blessing, even though it rarely felt like that.
As she said to Greg after the weekend with his parents, “You know I told you how I think of my childhood? As a cryptic place populated by people you can’t help feeling are strangers? And you nodded.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I nodded because I thought that was beautifully put,” Greg said.
Jane found that describing her parents’ oddities to Greg was a surprisingly positive experience. This was not only because he often laughed but also because she came across as an almost more interesting person against the grim background, just as the story of any passionate emotion can add a new dimension to one’s opinion of somebody. But her stories had been given a wry, anecdotal quality and been subject to her own edits; for Greg to meet her parents in real life would be quite different. What would he think when her father came out with one of his conspiratorial monologues about America as the lost paradise? Probably that it helped to explain her prevailing pessimism. And when her mother tried to cover up another attack of depression by dishing up a nonstop series of labor-intensive meals and snacks—would Greg fear that her agitated version of melancholia was heritable? Would he realize why their house did not feel like a home but a small, rock-paneled shrine that served as a place of refuge from life?
After their decision to spend Christmas with her parents—just how they came to agree on it was permanently clouded by the enigmatic fog of love—her worries grew more precise. What would Greg make of the tradition of having three Christmas trees (one natural and green, one coated in silver, and another in blinding white), spray-painted by her father in the garage, decorated by her mother in a manic pre-Christmas frenzy but seen only by very few others because her parents hardly ever had guests?
“Jane, listen,” he said while they waited for Robert to pick them up outside the arrivals hall at Mitchell Airport. “For all I care, your parents could have lobster claws and glow in the dark. It’s you I want.”
The full range of Greg’s social skills was revealed to her during that Christmas holiday. If she had not been in love with him, she might have found his behavior rather too chameleon-like. Had she not married him and spent eighteen years at his side, Jane might even have remembered him as manipulative.