Otherwise Engaged (11 page)

I get home around dawn. I slide my key into the lock. I feel like a burglar.

What if he isn’t there? whispers the monster.

But he is. He is twisted up in the sheets, a glass of seltzer by the bed. His face is white.

“I have a migraine,” he says.

I drop my clothes and get into bed. We lie side by side, naked and holding hands. Then I rub his temples until his migraine goes away.

I can do that.

Today we went to the Sausalito art fair, and I saw a ceramic bowl with a toaster and the word
HOME
painted on it. Michael bought it for me. Driving home, twice I start to ask him if we are still getting married. But I am afraid. I feel like we’re walking over a drawbridge made of dental floss.

Later we are in the kitchen. I walk to the table, sift through the mail. There is a bill from
Modern Bride
for my subscription.

I put in on top of the pile. I wait until he turns around and then I say, “Oh. My bill from
Modern Bride
came.”

“Uh-huh,” he says, looking straight at me.

Then he asks me if I want spaghetti for dinner. He is tying on an apron.

“Yes,” I say. He turns back toward the stove. I touch the bill. It is pink, with black writing.

I sit down, write a check for twenty dollars, and seal the envelope.

Tonight Michael came home from working late and went straight to bed without brushing his teeth or checking the answering machine. He crawled into bed, waking me as his belt hit the floor, and he peeled his clothes off, kissing me at the same time as he threw his watch onto the nightstand and tore the strap of my nightgown lifting it over my head.

Afterward we both said I love you about ten times.

G
raham decided he won’t be my partner anymore. He’s leaving advertising to tour the country in his lime-green convertible and film a documentary about street people. We’ve been together five years. He was telling the Creative Director from L.A. how he was leaving the agency, and I happened to be upstairs, walking by. That’s how I found out.

I feel shocked. The wife who has been left while the husband goes off to find himself as she stays behind with two-year-olds and chocolate-smeared walls and ratty hair.
The last to know
. As I grow older, all the clichés come crackling to life.

So much for my trainer marriage.

Stayed home and cried for two days. Thank God for Michael.

He is all that matters, I’m finding out. Interesting.

• • •

This morning the Creative Director from L.A. called me into his office. He took me aside, empathy on his face. He pulled his chair up next to mine, and slowly put on his Giorgio Armani glasses. As though he were a kindly father, about to read aloud to me.

He said, “Obviously, you’re not leaving.”

I inched my chair a little bit away from him.

“I don’t think that’s obvious at all,” I said.

He waved his hand at the air, dismissive. Brushed his long blond hair back from his forehead. “We’re going to be making you a group head, of course. That’s all been taken care of.…”

I thought about how lonely and sad it was going to be without Graham. I opened my mouth and said, “Partner.”

“Partner?” The Creative Director from L.A. blinked a little blink. There are only nine of those, even though the name of the agency is Silverbaum and Partners.

“Yes.” I look out his huge bay-view window. I think of Graham’s little sliver of a window.

“I think that would really make me happy,” I said. Still looking out the window.

And that is how I became a partner.

As I was leaving, he still had on the kindly father-figure face.

He said, “Gideon tells me you’re getting married?”

“Yes,” I said. Gideon is his assistant, whom he makes pour his coffee and who secretly spits in it. “October nineteenth.”

“That’s great,” he said.

He smiled, but it was wrong. Like seeing bits of your safari guide’s clothes wedged between the lion’s teeth.

• • •

Ate lunch at the newest overpriced downtown restaurant with sponge-painted yellow walls and tiny wooden bowls of sea salt at a table the size of a laser disk. My wise friend Jill (who wrote the Calgon … Take Me Away campaign) and I were commiserating over Graham’s abandonment. I told her I felt depressed, that I had been assigned a new partner, but still felt bereft. She promised me that it would pass.

She said, “Nothing ever stays the same. That’s the good news …”

She formed a tiny Mona Lisa smile.

“… it’s also the bad news.”

Beth left her husband. It wasn’t working out. She tried for nine years, which seems to me more than enough; even derogatory credit stops after that.

When she was twenty-three and first met Robert, whose mother used to make him sit naked on the radiator when he was bad, Robert said that he never wanted to have children. This was fine, at first. Then she discovered midway through the marriage that she wanted kids after all.

When Beth tried to talk to him about it, he said, “We had a deal.” She said, “You’re right. OK.” A year or so went by; she started running. Casually at first and then in local marathons. She asked him again about the possibility of his reversing his decision.

He said, “What about our deal?”

Being a fair person, Beth nodded. A deal is a deal. She started running longer distances, getting up at five instead of
six. Her periods ceased. Then, two years ago, in some sort of medical miracle, she became pregnant.

Robert was unenthusiastic. He said, “OK, but he’s your responsibility.” Beth was sure he would change his mind once the baby was born, but he never did. Every diaper was hers, every midnight feeding and ministration of justice.

After Max was born, they stopped having sex. That is also part of the deal.

Then yesterday, on her thirty-sixth birthday, she loaded the baby in the car, picked Robert up at his office at 6:10 as usual, told him she and Max were moving out to her sister’s house in Bolinas, then drove away.

She had put her suitcase in the trunk beforehand. I don’t worry about Beth.

I do however wish that people would at least stay together until the day after our wedding.

I was at the Marina library today and there was a woman about eighty years old, in navy-blue Converse skate shoes and a yellow rain slicker. I was at the S’s in fiction, when without preamble she said, “This Danielle Steel must write day and night. Rubbish.”

I offer, “She lives up on Broadway, in a big white Victorian.”

She answers without looking at me, as though we are old friends who need not look at each other. “Oh, yes. I’m sure it’s very … pastel. Full of froufrou beds. God help us.”

I thought about how people don’t get old, not really. They are their absolute selves until the last second when
they die and go somewhere else, leaving their body like a tire on the side of the road.

I want to ask her what she thinks about marriage or partnerships in general. But I don’t want to wreck the moment, which is as perfect a one as I am likely to get, today.

Came home to a hallway full of feathers. The Cow had had his way with a small sparrow who had the misfortune to fly into the apartment. There were feathers everywhere, and a tiny bird head in the center of the hallway. The Cow felt great about it, you could tell. He was sitting there like Muammar Qaddafi, preening himself.

Even though he was working late, I left it for Michael. He came in at eleven, picked the bird’s head up with a paper towel, and then announced that feminism had a ways to go.

Clark, my newly assigned partner, is very excited to be working with me. He will be my art director for the new television spot next month, and possibly beyond. We’ve awarded the job to a French production company in order to fulfill our specific conceptual vision for this creative project. It’s called Work with a French Director, Get a Free Trip to France. Clark has spent time with Graham and me, so he understands the prime objectives.

Clark says France is fantastic. To Clark, everything is either fantastic or else it’s crap. Clark has green hair and graduated from the Parsons School of Design, after growing up on a hog farm.

“… ’s crap,” he’ll say, dismissing Herb Ritts or Mathew Ralston, or sometimes even an entire state. He once said Pennsylvania was crap.

Or else, “Fantastic,” as when he’s gazing at a photocopy of a fried chicken menu that he has run through an old fax machine backward, and then overexposed and blown up to poster size, having billed all this to General Agency, the job number he refers to as the Black Hole.

When he wandered into my office today, Clark and I consulted the Eight Ball about the Creative Director from L.A., who just had a whole spread in a large trade magazine in which his picture is shown next to a lot of work other people did.

We ask the Eight Ball,

Will the Creative Director from L.A. go back to L.A.?

You may rely on it

Will the next guy be an even worse bastard who fires everyone and brings in his own people?

It is certain

“Fantastic,” Clark says.

The Eight Ball is frighteningly accurate. But we can’t use it too much, or it will lose its potency.

I begin to think, for approximately the millionth time in my life, that even though things haven’t gone the way I planned, it’s possible that I will be fine.

Last night at 2 a.m., a taxi drove up outside our window and let out its passengers. A second later, a man shouted, “I buy you a shot and you hit me in the face. Why you wanna do that?”

No response from the other party. I know, because I waited.

Today was Graham’s last day. I don’t know what to add to that.

I got through it pretty well. Wrote him a nice one-page letter, left it on his chair. He was out somewhere.

At the end of the day as I walked to the garage, I started choking, involuntarily, a dry little cough from way deep. I couldn’t figure it out; I wanted to laugh. Then I let myself into my car and sobbed into my hands.

I notice that, as the wedding date approaches, some doors are opening and others are closing. I have no control.

Beth got a nice ten-page letter from her husband, soon to be ex. She read it to me over the phone. When they were married, he went days without speaking.

I listened to her as she read it through to the last page, as he spoke about his deep regrets, how he knew his innate damage had caused the destruction of their marriage. How he was cracked, like an ice tray. Beth was obviously trying not to cry, reading it like a newspaper article, but then at the end she just laughed for a long time and said, “Christ. Now I have to
think
about him.”

Went to Graham’s flat in Russian Hill for his Going out of Business party. He had orderly price tags on each item in his home. A lesbian art director got there before me and
swooped on the best lamp. Though I arrived quite early, I hadn’t counted on the lesbian art director factor.

I smoked cigarettes sitting out on the balcony with Jesus, who is Graham’s dog and who did not have a price tag on him. I bought a small chest of drawers, painted with red roses. His friend Craig is going to take over the apartment, which makes me happy. Craig has a business card that says “Craig Debora Taylor, Opulent Superstar” on it, alongside a color photograph of him with sequins pasted on his head and full harlequin makeup.

Craig arrived around midnight and announced excitedly that the optometrist had phoned; his red contact lenses were ready, and so were the black ones. When I left the party was in full swing. I never want to see things end.

When I went back to Graham’s flat today, everything was white and bare. Graham said that after the drag queens arrived at 2 a.m., they pretty much cleaned it out. Then he gave me a brown paper bag of items that didn’t get sold the night before. As I walked to the kitchen to get some water, I saw a long row of bags meticulously lined up, military style. He had a bag for each of his friends.

I looked inside my bag when I got home. My name was written across it, in Graham’s perfectly square handwriting. Inside was a small gold tray that his father had brought back from Italy after World War II, a blue vase, and two books. One of them was
You Can’t Go Home Again
. There exists an angel in heaven whose one and only assignment is to fuck with me.

When we first became partners, working on regional
television ads at a small agency south of Market, his parents came out to visit, and I met his father. He sat through the whole lunch at Fringale and said almost nothing, just two ice-blue eyes buried in an old mountain face, while Graham’s mother talked. I had forgotten he was there when suddenly he spoke, an unexpected, slicing truthful remark, tossed like diamonds on the table. And I realized that he had heard every word. Just like Graham. He waited, like a copperhead.

Graham’s father had a seizure last year in his London home while we were both in Los Angeles on a Pringles Potato Chip shoot for their new product, Pringles Sour Cream n’ Onion Lite. He had immediate and successful surgery, and then quietly and unexpectedly died. Before Graham could make it back.

On his trip across country, Graham will make his way to upstate New York, to see his mother, who lives there now and is sixty-nine.

“I want to see my mom,” is what he says.

We look at each other for a moment, in the empty whiteness of his old life.

I nod, not saying anything. As always, a separate, more complete dialogue passes between us, in the space just above our heads.

This afternoon I saw Reuben. I told him about my elves dream, where I am flying with Graham.

Reuben is a Jungian; at the start of our sessions, whenever I hesitate for more than a few seconds, he asks me about my dreams and I have to tell him. It’s either tell him the dreams or tell him the reality.

“In the dream,” I tell him, “the elves had come and then we were able to fly. We flew for a long time.”

Reuben asks me what I think it represents.