But I did. Dylan and I had never really spoken about What Happened Next. The fall term at UCLA started before Labor Day, and September first I was supposed to go to Rochester to look over a collection that Kodak was thinking of selling to the museum. It seemed impossible that our relationship could outlast the summer; it seemed ridiculous that I should even dream of it doing so. Yet the mere thought of going on without Dylan, of returning home alone to the carriage house every day, was enough to reduce me to tears. But I was afraid to ask him to stay.
At night I lay beside him and listened to the mockingbird in the garden outside. Dylan’s dark tousled hair spilled across the sheets, moonlight threw shadows across his chest and throat and I would be so flooded with love and desire that I would fall on him like a panther, biting softly at his throat, the skin there taut and tasting like a salted peach. Groaning, he would awaken and we’d fall onto the floor, Dylan clutching me as I straddled him, while outside the moon hung like another fruit in the sky.
“Oh, Sweeney, Sweeney…”
His voice broke as he hugged me to him and I cried, we both cried, from joy or exhaustion or unspoken fear, or perhaps just because it was so beautiful, so terribly, terribly beautiful there in the moonlit summer night with the smell of roses and wisteria perfuming our skin.
A few days before his birthday we went to Kelly’s, the Irish bar next to the Dubliner. They knew me there and never raised an eyebrow when they saw me with Dylan, and never asked to see his ID. The ceiling fans turned desultorily overhead, but otherwise everyone seemed to have given in to the heat. Maureen the bartender had stripped down to a Wonderbra and a pair of men’s plaid boxer shorts; the band was wearing much the same, minus the bra. Dylan drank black-and-tans and I sipped cognac. The band knocked back pints of Guinness and cooled off by spraying each other with bottles of Molson. When closing time came Maureen hopped over the bar, locked the door, and lowered the lights, so the rest of us could stay inside. We drank some more, yelling requests, and the band played everything from the Irish national anthem to “Purple Haze” and “Ghost on the Highway.” Dylan took his shirt off and we danced by the unplugged jukebox, knocking over bottles and pint glasses and sliding in spilt beer. As the light in the windows turned the color of a steel penny, Dylan went up and gave Sean the lead singer a twenty-dollar-bill, and the band played their last song—
We stood and swayed in front of the tiny stage, and Dylan shouted drunkenly in my ear and pointed to where Sean listed in front of the microphone—
“Listen, Sweeney!”
—as Sean sang in his raw, Guinness-blurred tenor.
“Would you, Sweeney?” Dylan pulled me to him until our noses bumped. His breath was warm and sweet and beery as his arms encircled me. “Would you?”
I looked at him, confused. “Would I—?”
“Stay with me? Marry me—forever?”
“Marry you?”
“Marry me!” Dylan shouted. He turned to the band and yelled drunkenly, “I just asked her to marry me!”
From behind the bar Maureen and her friends cheered, and the few others scattered at tables joined in. Sean laughed and yelled into the microphone, “And what did she say?”
Dylan looked at me. “What did you say?”
I stared up at him, at the grinning faces watching us from onstage and at Maureen and the expectant strangers behind the bar; then, laughing, I flung my arms out and shouted the only thing that seemed appropriate.
“Yes, I said—yes I will!—
“Yes.”
That was how I decided to get married. The next morning neither Dylan nor I had changed our minds, although we didn’t make any immediate plans to find a chapel. It was the thirty-first of July. Tomorrow Dylan would turn nineteen. Angelica was still supposed to be coming for his birthday, although I had no idea when she’d arrive or what arrangements, if any, she and Dylan had made. Now it felt even stranger to think about Angelica—my former friend and onetime lover was going to be my mother-in-law? I had no close friends of my own to confide in, certainly not anyone who would understand the inherent weirdness of the whole situation with Dylan and me. So I decided to concentrate on planning a private birthday celebration for just the two of us. Dinner at home, since otherwise we wouldn’t be able to drink champagne. It was too hot to cook, so I thought we’d bring home a couple of boxes of sushi from a place on the Hill. I laid in three bottles of Taitinger and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. If Angelica decided to show up, well, I’d deal with that later.
I did want to tell someone, though. So when I got to the office I finally broke down and called Baby Joe. After three rings his machine clicked in and I heard an unfamiliar voice.
“You have reached Daniel Aquilante at the Arts Desk of the New York Beacon. Please leave a message at the tone, or else call Reception at 8407.”
“That’s weird.” I frowned and dialed again, got the same recording. “Huh.”
I double-checked the number in my computer, then tried Baby Joe at home.
“The number you have reached has been disconnected.”
I dialed again and got the same playback. When I put the phone down I felt chilled. I walked over to my window and stared outside.
The Aditi had ended last weekend. Now the Mall looked like the aftermath of Woodstock or something worse—trash heaped in huge piles inside hurricane fencing, Park Police and orange-suited custodial engineers everywhere, bare scaffolding and dead grass where I had grown accustomed to seeing luminously colored kiosks and tents. That morning in the coffee room I’d overheard someone talking about an infestation of rats outside, drawn by the mountains of food left to rot in the heat. At the time I’d laughed, but now I felt distinctly uneasy. I turned back to my desk and dialed Manhattan information, then called the main number at the New York Beacon.
“I’m trying to reach José Malabar,” I said when someone finally picked up the line.
Silence. “I’m a friend of his from college,” I explained. “I was out of town for a while, and when I got back I had several messages from him on my machine—”
“Hold on, please.”
A moment later someone else came on, a woman with a pleasant but reserved-sounding voice. “Who’s calling, please?”