Otherwise Engaged (12 page)

I say, “Ascending.”

“What else?” he asks.

I fidget in my chair. All at once, I feel too tired to talk. But I tell him.

“Trying to do the best work I can. To keep going in the face of all the shit. Of which there’s a lot.”

“What else?”

“Magic. They represent the magic in life, that you can’t know about.”

He looks satisfied. Then he says, “There are two realms of importance in existence. There is the outer world and the inner world. In the outer world you do very well. In the inner world, I sense you may feel that you are a second-class citizen …”

This is as close as he has ever come to a diagnosis.

“… it’s my job to help you with the inner world …”

I think he is finished, when out of the silence he says, “… where the elves live.”

Drinking coffee, I think about how Graham and I have the same car. Both Saabs, both procured when we did our first big television campaign.

I remember after the favorable review in
Adbuzz
came out Graham said, “You know what this means?” I looked at him blankly.

He said, “You ain’t got to worry ’bout goin’ hungry no mo’.”

To celebrate, we bought cars. We didn’t decide together;
we just both liked the same kind. Mine was black; his was white. He got his first, and had it painted from its original color to a bright green.

My license plate is special ordered. It reads
KLUUNAD
, which is a planet we invented.

Another art director once asked Graham, in front of me, if he knew what Kluunad meant. Graham looked at me. Graham frequently looked at me while he spoke to others.

“Kluunad is where we go sometimes …,” Graham said.

“You know, when you’re away on a shoot and the phone rings for the wake-up call and it’s 5 a.m. and you don’t know where you are. That’s Kluunad.…”

He continues to look at me. As if I don’t already know. As if I am a conduit to some new, fourth person.

“Or when you call people and they ask ‘Where are you?’ and you’re standing with a cellular phone in the desert, surrounded by production trucks, and you look around and say, ‘I don’t know.’

“That’s Kluunad.”

Thinking of these things is magical to me. Graham and I were definitely on some very weird trip, for a special, limited time.

I knew nothing when I met Graham. He never seemed to notice. He just quietly taught me which directors were cool, which designers understood. He brought in
The Medium Is the Message
and Barbara Kruger’s
Love for Sale
and Larry Clark and Howard Gossage and Jenny Holzer books.

Then we did that big television campaign for athletic shoes, twenty-five million. Television, print, billboards, radio, bus shelters, phone kiosks, postcards, buttons. All with Jasper Lyne the crazy British designer who drove an old school bus and who truly believed that Kluunad was a real
place. And every day we’d go up to the top of the Filbert steps and drink Guiness and chain smoke and think of new headlines.

And then it came out and
Adbuzz
and the
Wall Street Journal
and
Newsweek
named it one of the ten best of the year. And somehow we won an Emmy, and began fielding calls from various newspapers and magazines for interviews, which is what we mostly did all day long. Work the power.

And that was it. There was nowhere else to go.

What comforts me mostly are the secrets. The fact that we got away with so much, a lot more than anyone will ever know. The trips to Paris, New York, New Mexico, London. The spa weeks in L.A., editing and going back to our beachfront rooms in Santa Monica and ordering popcorn shrimp and Pouilly-Fuissé. Expensing everything and exchanging blank taxi receipts like baseball cards.

They can never take Kluunad away. I made it up, the word. Kluunad. Two
U
’s. It was one of the first times I ever saw Graham laugh.

It may be that I said it just so that he would.

Coleman Barks, the poet, says perhaps that’s what God is. The urge to laugh.

L
ast week was Phoebe’s birthday. She’s fourteen now. Michael is in one of his low-grade depressions where he wanders around like Macbeth. His appetite is shot and after work he just sits around with a warm beer, murmuring to himself, “I don’t get to watch her grow up.

“My fault,” he says, staring at his nails.

I never noticed before how hard it is to deal with his depressions in addition to my own spiraling moods; now of course I hear the Chinese gong and
FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
and I almost can’t stand it. Suddenly he is not the person I thought he was. He is a much lesser person, shorter and sadder and infinitely more damaged.

I look at photographs from last month and he is seemingly the same Michael, so I don’t know how this has happened. I can only hope that when I come home
tonight the old Michael will be there, and the other one will be gone.

He’s not getting better.

His weekly call to Phoebe went badly; she was watching television while they spoke, and when another call came in, she took it.

I tell him to call Phoebe again and tell her that he misses her, but he says, “She doesn’t want to talk to me.

“She’s dating,” he says hollowly. I have no answer for that, nothing to mitigate the horror of that.

I go so far as to make brisket, but he doesn’t eat it. He can’t. His pants are beginning to hang on him, a white flag.

I consider copping some Prozac and mashing it into his toothpaste. What would it taste like? is the thing to worry about. Detection.

There should be a long poem devoted only to the names of antidepressant drugs; Lewis Carroll should write it.

Elavil, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft.

Zoloft sounds like a very wise wizard who once was tempted to go over to the dark side but never did. His coat would be purple, I think, and his long staff studded with amethyst. He’d have a bird. A white bird.

My friend Jill insists I am wrong.

Zoloft, she says, is a wizened old woman with a black velvet bag that closes with a golden cord and has stars and moons all over it. Her empty-headed daughter is Elavil, who always wears white and ballet slippers. Whose hair looks
beautiful from a distance but is actually quite thin. Elavil powders her face with rice flour and is engaged to Prozac, a magician who performs for royalty in silver tights. They will never marry, says Jill. Tragedy will avert it.

Wellbutrin is a place just south of New Orleans. According to Jill.

I feel despondent and hopeless. I thought being engaged would transform me. Instead I feel inadequate, unsure, deeply tired, and as though I will certainly fail.

Most of them do fail. Sixty-eight percent. I know all the figures now.

No one talks about this feeling. I may be the only one who has ever felt it.

I used to dream about being married to Michael, how ideal it would be. Both of us serenely independent yet madly in love, supporting our meteoric careers with a steady stream of great sex and European vacations. This is not going to happen, I realize, with a sudden weariness. We’re going to be like everyone else, lucky to survive without one of us murdering the other, like the farmer in Oregon who killed his wife with a frozen squirrel.

We haven’t even gotten married yet, and already I can quite clearly ascertain what Morley Safer would call the burning issues, just waiting to be fanned. His messiness, my impulsiveness, his moodiness, who spends more money.

We haven’t even gotten married yet, and already I feel I’ve been married for several years. Is this what engagement is like? Or do I have the trick engagement? The kind that only happens to people who should never get married in the first place.

Today at our session, Reuben said I can’t expect marriage to be one long orgasm. But he pointed out that it was often better than having no one and being alone.

Then he said, “Time’s up.”

After the first forty years of marriage, the divorce rate is very low. I read that this morning. It did not seem particularly to help.

I talked to Dusty today and he said that he is dating a new man whom he is trying to horrify with true stories from his past, including the rehab hospital story, the cold sore origin story, and the story about how when he was growing up his neighbor used to make his daughter and Dusty dry out their turds so he could read their fortunes.

Dusty says he doesn’t want this new man to think he’s just the boy next door.

Then he says it isn’t working yet because the new man just seems fascinated by the stories and wants him to write them all down.

“I was hoping he’d run away so that I could begin to like him,” he says.

“You are so very unwell,” I say.

In the background I can hear a woman with an intimate, deep voice selling solid perfume. Only two thousand left.

“This is
solid
perfume,” she explains. “This is a treat.”

“It’s Tova,” Dusty says. “Ernest Borgnine’s wife.”

Out of all the QVC hosts, Kathy Levine is Dusty’s favorite. He also has a secret crush on Dan Hughes, who is the morning host and also the race-car host. Dusty has his
own Q Number, which he has memorized. He knows perhaps a little more than he should about the hosts, frequently watching all night long and then sleeping in until three or four the next day. Yet all in all, it’s probably better than waking up in jail, still drunk and swathed in urine-soaked pants, his last memory that of being carried out of a bar weeping. Probably.

“I adore Tova,” Dusty says.

Modern Bride
keeps coming: huge, wrapped in thick plastic. Covers resplendent with lace-veiled twenty-year-old blonds whose fathers are international bankers. Whose fathers are alive and writing checks in their mahogany studies, their boundless joy and confidence suggests.

“How much do you need?” they ask, over horn-rimmed half glasses.

None of these cover girls has ever buried anyone. They have never been stood up or hit or have awoken with blood on their pillow from too much cocaine. They live size-2 lives of constant love and laughter. Their parents are still together; they hold hands and take long leisurely vacations where no one drinks too much or raises their voice.

At their large well-organized weddings, the
Modern Bride
women dance the first dance with their father. They both cry.

I broke down and called Reuben, using the home number. I needed to talk to someone about Michael’s depression, which is making me feel not just helpless and sad, but
depressed. And something else: rage. I think Reuben will be shocked, but he isn’t.

People are never shocked.

He said that it was fine if I wanted to comfort Michael, and fine if I didn’t. That actually by comforting him, I might be derailing him from the work he needs to do.

This feels like permission to be a heartless bitch. I run with it.

You go through sudden periods where you change your mind; you think, No, not him.

Husbands should be at least six feet two inches tall, you think. They should be thirty-five years old forever, and they should have thick dark hair and black Izod shirts and a pilot’s license. They should never get depressed, providing emotional bedrock not just some of the time but always. And he knows you’re doubting him, and then he gets even smaller until he looks like a midget. A sideshow freak. A man without legs on a skateboard dolly in front of Macy’s.

You pull out of it, you look at him again. And he’s two inches taller than you are, as he has been all along, and it’s fine again.

I also think about death more, now.

I used to focus on Michael’s death, since he’s older than I am. But now I begin to see my own mortality, winking from behind the folds of lace. Maybe that’s why I am stalling on finding the wedding dress. If I don’t get married, I’ll never move on, and then I will never die. I can just date forever and stay young. No one who’s old dates.

I search for loopholes.

Reuben nails my fantasies every time, with iron rods of reality. He asserts that I am going to die, but probably not for a while, and that maybe I should try getting married and having a life first. He’s seventy and knows things, which is why I go to him. But it’s sad to leave my romantic illusions at the door of this passage. Although false and destructive and useless, they’ve been tremendous company.

We were taking a walk around the block when Michael said he was a good value.

“Sure I’m depressed now,” he said, “but don’t forget what a good value I am.”

“Why?” I asked. I wanted him to sell me.

“I’m smart, I’m funny, I’m good-looking, and I make more money than you do.”

“Not by much,” I say. I am closing the gap. Coming in hard on the outside.

It’s lifting.

This morning, immediately upon waking, Michael said, “You know who has really nice lips? Mr. Potato Head.

“They’re his best feature,” he said.

He says something like this and keeps me from giving up on love, which is so hard and demanding and tricky. He says something like this and keeps me from leaving. Leaving is what I am good at. Leaving and driving people away.

When I first knew him, he once turned to me and said, “If I had to choose only one fabric, it would be rayon.”

• • •

The honeymoon is planned. Tickets to Paris have been procured, using up all of Michael’s Delta frequent-flier miles, which he didn’t even know he had. They would have just expired quietly in his desk drawer, had I not ferreted them out. We are going to fly business class, 150,000 miles for both tickets. I’m stunned that Gabrielle didn’t get to them earlier; they had somehow slipped through a crack in the system.

I read in a guidebook that the Hôtel Panthéon in the Latin Quarter has the perfect room for honeymooners, with a canopy bed and a view, all for less than two hundred dollars a night including breakfast. Room 14. I send a fax, they send one back, and it’s ours.

This is tremendous. It is absolutely nothing like planning a wedding.

I am spooning with him, on top of the bed. It’s almost noon, and neither one of us has gotten up.