Stick
By the end of your first week together, Victor stops asking you to marry him and simply tells you instead.
By the end of your first month together, he’s broken the lease on his midtown bachelor pad that he never really lived in and moved into our apartment on West End Avenue.
By the end of your second month together, you say yes, by the end of your third month he’s going to parent-teacher meetings with you, you’ve had three high-decibel arguments, and by the end of your fifth month together, you are married.
It takes a while to figure out why, of all your suitors, this one. It may be nothing more than his timing. You’ve been in New York for the better part of five years, which is about three years beyond your original timeline for becoming a world-renowned opera star and meeting a good man. He’s handsome, sure. He knows music; you have things to talk about. He wants to help your career, that’s a huge plus, but that’s not the whole of it. He’s not the first to fall madly in love with you, not the first to propose, and he’s not a whole bunch of other things too. He’s not uncertain, about anything, and to your mind that is possibly his greatest asset. You are certain of few things, and rely heavily on the certainty of others. And he is as certain of you as he’s ever been of anything, which is good, because that is the thing about which you are least certain, and you hope to god his certainty about you will make up the difference. And as much as anything, he’s not Fred.
New York has been, at times, exciting beyond your ability to handle it. You’ve also barely made your rent more than a few times, even though your rent is still about as cheap as it gets. You don’t mind pinching pennies, but you’re growing tired of store-brand everything, and there’s not always time to let down the hems on Betsy’s dresses when she grows two inches in a week — it would be nice, once in a while, to send them to a tailor. And let’s face it: you’re thirty-four. It’s 1971 and you’re thirty-four — almost thirty-five — and that’s not ancient but this is a weird era for you. It doesn’t feel like yours. It’s confusing. War protests, race riots, moon landings? Women’s lib? It doesn’t seem bad in theory, you might never have made it out of Iowa without it, but still. If you’d been born even ten years earlier, you might have gotten stuck with a Fred for your entire life, but all of this — hippies and free love (you live only two hours from Woodstock, but hear little of it) — you did your best to try on a version of that, only to find that wasn’t you either. Love is never free. Not to mention that there’s all kinds of holy hell happening around the world that you don’t understand the half of and couldn’t handle if you did. There’s plenty of holy hell happening inside your own head. You want some stability. You had thought you might be a star by now and you aren’t. You hope that Victor will help turn that around; in opera, you’re not over the hill yet at all — look at Sutherland, Tebaldi, Price — and you know, you know, that you are better than ever and could be better still. But you have doubts on top of doubts, about your career prospects, about yourself as a human fit for the world, epic, wide-ranging doubts — and this new man has not a one. This is something you can only marginally comprehend, that a person could be so utterly doubtless, but Victor Silvestri is a man who knows what he knows. He knows music, he knows talent, he knows what he loves (you, in absurd amounts, to the point where he sees your flaws as assets), he knows what’s right and what’s wrong without doubt, ever, and though you have been known to state many and varied and sometimes even conflicting opinions as though you have no doubt, really, you don’t know anything without doubt, and you suppose that it would be nice — more than nice, a relief — to have someone in the house whose doubt couldn’t blow down the entire building with one heavy sigh. And you do like him; he’s sexy, he’s steady, he’s a good father figure, he takes care of you, and you know now that you are a person who likes being taken care of. Who needs being taken care of. “Taken care of” here meaning being there with an unassailable point of view and a steady paycheck, and perhaps even just being around for those times when pouring out a bowl of cereal for your kid before school is more than you can manage by yourself.
It’s a June wedding. You should have been a June bride the first time; that was probably mistake number one. (You will never admit that being nineteen was mistake number one; you will claim forever and always that you knew exactly what you were doing.) This time, you have engagements on the books to rehearse for, so you have the dresses made for you: yours, Audrey’s, and mine (though you have to do a bit of alteration work on mine because I’ve gone and grown, again, since the measurements were taken); you plan this shindig with two months’ notice.
You learn the extent to which Victor’s mother is perpetually late; today, two hours. This would be unacceptable on most occasions, save for some horrific circumstances not involving simply getting dressed and made up, and today, it’s just under bring-me-a-straightjacket level. She’s in the wedding. You could go ahead without her, but after an exchange of heated messages between your dressing room at the church and the anteroom where Victor and his best man are waiting (your messages leave your room heated—Tell Victor she has ten minutes to show up or I’m leaving—but they’re delivered by Audrey’s husband, Jack, with enough of a wink that Victor remains calm, and thank Christ his mother shows up before you have to make good on that. There’s no time to shift back into joyful-wedding-day mode before walking down the aisle, but Audrey whispers in your ear that it’s all going to be fine, and Audrey invented the reassuring tone of voice, and on your way down the aisle, on your father’s arm for the second time (thinking: Why in creation did we decide to do it this way? Why such a big deal, again? Why not City Hall?), you give your groom the death glare from the aisle, which only causes him to stifle his trademark loud and high-pitched laugh, over how much he loves you for and in spite of your death glare — which, in turn, reminds you why you decided not to split.