4. Prenuptial Agreement
Everything seemed to be going so well. Yes, he still had a vague worry in the back of his mind about how this all started—hallucinating a grown-up version of his dead sister—but with Madeleine in his life Quentin was beginning to realize how deeply unhappy he had been all these years. It took such small things, just her smile, her hand resting on his, and he would get this glow inside and he'd find himself wearing a goofy grin and nodding at everything she said and he'd realize: This is pretty good! This is what other people have known about all these years and tried to tell me! This is what kept my parents going even when their daughter died, even when their son became this weird wandering recluse, because they had this between them, this secret that you can't guess from outside, you have to be inside it, and then it's all so clear, it transforms the world like getting your first pair of glasses and suddenly you can read all the signs and recognize people from far off and pick out individual birds in the sky, that's how it felt and as far as Quentin was concerned, he wouldn't mind a bit if it kept going like this pretty much for the rest of his life.
Then he flew to San Francisco for meetings with some of his older partnerships. At the end of the trip he stopped in to see his lawyer, Wayne Read, to take care of the changes the marriage was going to require, like rewriting his will and changing the beneficiary on his insurance policies.
"Does she have a lawyer?" asked Wayne.
"I don't know."
"Does she have money? An estate?"
"I don't know."
"I need to know if I'm supposed to unilaterally write the prenup or negotiate it with another attorney, and if she has an estate that needs protecting or if it's just yours I need to worry about."
Quentin was annoyed. "I don't want my estate protected. When we're married it'll be our estate."
"You've known her what, a week and a half?"
"But I've been waiting for her all my life."
The lawyer just looked at him.
"That was humor," said Quentin.
"No, you meant it," said Wayne. "Listen, Quen, I've been your lawyer ever since you could afford one. I know that you've been miserably lonely that whole time. Now you've fallen in love and you don't want to believe anything bad can happen. But all these years you've been paying me to be the friend who will always tell you the truth. The friend who can give you bad news."
"The friend who charges me three hundred bucks an hour."
"The friend whose job is to know a lot more about how the world works than you do, and keep you from falling into heavy machinery."
"Metaphorically speaking."
"Sometimes people aren't what they seem."
"I know that, Wayne."
"No you don't, Quen. Because you are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too."
"I've had partners who cheated me."
"Who tried to cheat you. I draw up too good a contract for them to actually succeed."
"They got away with the money."
"Only because you let them. Only because you never let me sue or bring criminal charges."
"It was only money."
"No, after they embezzled it from you it was only money. When you had it, it was something more than money. It was fertile seed. It was the power of life. In your hands money makes things grow. In their hands it bought new cars and TV sets and some nice dinners out and then it had disappeared and nothing came of it."
"My point is that I don't care enough about money to need a prenuptial agreement. If Madeleine turns out to be a fake or even if the marriage just turns sour or something, don't you think that will be much more devastating than losing a few million bucks in a lousy divorce settlement? If I lose the woman I love, who cares about the money?"
"Quentin, you only say that because you've never lost either. Broken hearts heal. But when a fortune is gone, it stays gone forever."
"I'm still employable."
"No you're not, Quen. They're programming Pentiums and PowerPC chips and they're doing it in C. You don't know anything about that."
"She's not going to divorce me and she's not after my money. Can we get to the business I came here for?"
They got down to business and it didn't take long. On the day the marriage became valid, the new will would take effect, and Madeleine would become cobeneficiary of his insurance policies, along with his parents.
Wayne rose from behind his desk. "I'm very happy for you, Quentin. True love is rare."
Quentin stood up and shook his hand. "I hope I'm not being billed for that bit of counsel."
Wayne laughed dryly. "Since you're not listening to me anyway, I'll go ahead and ask the really lousy question: Have you got her HIV test results?"
Quentin took back his hand. "Wayne, you deal with my papers, not my sex life."
"Forget the HIV test, then, but at least tell me you've been using protection."
"Wayne, you're way over the line here."
The lawyer offered no hint of apology, just regarded him, waiting for an answer.
"But to ease your mind," Quentin finally said, "Mad and I haven't slept together."
Wayne looked genuinely stunned. "Are you living in a time warp?"
"The sixties never got to my house, and that means the nineties have nothing to scare me with."
"You've never even tried to sleep with her?"
"Wayne, you can shut up any time now." Quentin was still smiling, but it was getting thin.
"She's probably wondering by now if you're gay."
Quentin stopped in the doorway and said, "Wayne, you may think of yourself as a paid friend, but I think of you as my lawyer. Everything that happens with my business is your business. But what happens with my pants is between me and my dry cleaner."
"Marriage is a contract, Quentin. And my business is to warn you when you're walking drunk along the edge of a cliff. Congrats on the wedding, though. I'm sure you'll be very happy."
Quentin let the door make just the tiniest slam as he left.
But Wayne had said what he said, and now Quentin couldn't get it out of his mind. These were the nineties, after all. He wasn't so disconnected from the world around him that he didn't know how things had changed since he was in high school and the guys he knew had to work themselves up just to hold hands with a girl, let alone kiss her. The whole sexual revolution and then herpes and AIDS, he knew about them. They simply hadn't touched his life because he was one of the good kids who didn't play around. What about Madeleine, though? Somebody like her, it was impossible to think that in the nineties she hadn't had plenty of guys make moves on her. Had she moved back? Somebody on NPR about five years before had said something about how when you slept with somebody, you were also sleeping with everybody they had ever slept with. How many guys had Madeleine slept with? Up till he talked with Wayne Read, he had assumed that Madeleine was a virgin just like he was. When he thought about it, he realized that he had pretty much assumed that all nice women were virgins.
Wayne was right. He was in a time warp.
This was absurd. Wasn't the double standard supposed to work the other way? A guy who was all worried about whether his fiancée was a virgin was supposed to be a hypocrite with plenty of notches on his own belt.