Otherwise Engaged (15 page)

We all leaned in.

Margaret said that if day 1 is the first day of your period, then you should have sex on days 11 and 12 and that way you will have a girl.

She explained that when the egg comes down on the fourteenth day and you ovulate, all the male sperm from day 11 that aggressively rushed in and got there first will be dead.

“They can’t hang,” she said.

The females are slow and steady. When the egg comes down, they are the only ones standing.

Damn
the women are smarter, is what I was thinking.

Then she pointed her small white finger at us and said, “Do you realize you can only get pregnant for twenty-four hours a month?”

We all feel gypped by the twenty-four-hour window. It seems to decrease our authority. I myself felt I could get pregnant at any time, without even having sex. Like an amoeba, subdividing. I could just decide.

“Those fucking nuns lied,” says Margaret.

In the dream Graham is back and I’ve gone to see him at his new apartment. When I go to leave, my car has been stolen, and then I find it but the seats are backward.

I know Reuben will love the backward seats part at our session today, and he does.

“You need to pay attention to the back draft,” he proclaims. “What has come before.”

I sit with this. It feels uncomfortable.

“What else do you think the backward seats mean?” he asks.

I feel I know this one. I say, “Well, it’s true you should look behind you. But you can’t drive that way.”

Reuben nods.

“That’s something else the dream is trying to tell you—
the car represents your persona. Persona was the mask that the Greek actors wore. The car symbolizes this facade.”

Then he adds, “Especially in California.

“The car is not the deepest part of the trip, but it is the vehicle,” he says. “As Graham was a vehicle for you.”

He says this and then he smiles a little. Tying the bow.

I think about how Reuben has a Reuben persona. Friendly and interested like a long-nosed dog. An old dog. An old wise dog that has seen everything and can talk to birds.

Toward the end of our session I tell him about how I’m using my dreams in my work and how it’s all cross-pollinating in this alchemistic fashion. I tell him how, in my writing, I’ve discovered a second voice. As I say this Reuben hauls himself out of his customary slouch and looks very alive and interested, as if he has just discovered he has bingo.

“Carl Jung had a second voice which he called Persona Number Two,” he says.

How Germanic, I thought. Give them numbers.

“Jung seemed to think that, eventually, the stronger voice would emerge.”

“I don’t want the stronger voice to emerge,” I say. “I want both.” I am conscious of ordering it up. I’ll have the cake with ice cream, please.

When I leave, Reuben follows me out. We’ve gone into overtime, which we’ve never done. I didn’t even know you could.

As I descend the stairs, he says, “I think we’re going to see some fascinating things in the next few weeks.”

I felt he was waving a wand over my head when he said this, but he was behind me so I couldn’t know for certain.

• • •

Last night I dreamed the police impounded my car. My first thought as I wake up is that Reuben isn’t helping.

Then I lie in bed and feel smug about the fact that my car is safe in the garage.

Tonight Michael and I ate dinner in the kitchen with the radio on. There seemed to be nothing to say about anything. I felt surprised.

In the end it all comes down to two faces staring at each other across a table. They should
tell
people that.

Later I was lying flat on my back with my Powerbook on my chest, typing in bed. My head was crooked up on a pillow at a right angle.

“You’re doing terrible things to your spine,” Michael said.

A few seconds went by, and then he said, “That was my mother speaking through me.”

I’m severely PMS. What my friend Jill calls, Pardon Me, Sybil.

Michael wants me to go back on the Pill, which I went off after reading the tiny information pamphlet. He doesn’t like me to have PMS. “You were an angel while you were on the Pill,” he says.

When he talks about my being an angel, with a supercilious look of dissatisfaction on his face, I want to harm him.

Then get yourself an angel, I want to say. Let me help you meet the angels.

If he gets a hangnail, we all have to race for an ambulance. But I can’t have anything go wrong with me. This seems to be the deal.

I realize anew that it’s not the purchase price of love, it’s the
maintenance
. That’s where they screw you.

A year is far too long a time to be engaged. Much, much too long.

We had been bickering all day, a Sunday. Michael was on the back porch, smoking an enormous cigar in the dark. He said he thought relationships are just something that keep you from doing what you really want.

That’s when I said it. “Well, then maybe you shouldn’t get married.”

He didn’t reply, just glared at me as he fondled his cigar. The kind of man who keeps a jarful of soldiers’ ears in his bunker.

Last night I slept far over on my side of the bed, dangling off the edge, one arm touching the floor. He tried to make up once, but I shrugged him off.

This morning I was downtown and by chance I saw Michael walking across the street. I called his name. He turned around, and his face was dead. He wasn’t happy to see me.

When I was four, I was swinging from a tree limb, and suddenly I lost my grip. I fell to the ground, and the wind was knocked out of me. This is what that felt like.

I hurried back to my office and called Lana. Her line was busy. A minute later, the phone rang and it was she. We
always go through the exact same things at the exact same time.

Lana is thinking about leaving Raul. And Michael apparently wishes I were in Zambia.

What I said to Lana was, “There’s only one thing I know that’s worse than this, and that’s being lonely.” She agreed. We are not liberated people.

We talked about how maybe someday Lana and Yvonne and I will live in a big house. A two-story white house, near the ocean. With a fence.

We can decide later if it is to be electric or not.

I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, and a car had stopped at the northbound toll plaza, in the free direction. A disembodied voice boomed from the loudspeakers above:
“THERE IS NO STOPPING OR TURNING AROUND. YOU ARE COMMITTED TO THE BRIDGE.”

A morning of the most bizarre and desperate meetings imaginable at the agency, all about the new Strategy, which the account people always say is coming but never does.

I feel haggard, as though I have been living the same day over and over again. It occurs to me that I detest advertising and that this fact isn’t going to go away, that actually as I approach forty it will intensify. I begin to understand that I am not going to be allowed a second, more honorable lifetime, where I teach handicapped children and write politically correct musicals and know Toni Morrison.

Then I flog myself over the fact that I should be happy. I
am making good money and working on the largest account in the country in the most beautiful city in the world. And every few months someone calls from New York to try to get me to interview. I am at my peak.

I am at my peak and from here you can really see the crucifixions.

I have a dream where Graham is dressed in a giant clown suit. He takes off the orange-wigged headpiece to show me that it is just him. He is smiling in the dream, and everything is fine.

I told Reuben about it. He said, “In the Zuni culture there is a ceremonial dance where everyone dances in one direction, and a clown runs in the other direction, poking fun at the rest of the dancers.

“It would be helpful if you thought of Graham as the clown.”

Suddenly I am teeming with clowns.

Before I leave, I ask Reuben, “Shouldn’t I be getting over this by now?”

I am crying, but I pretend not to be.

“It’s only been three months,” he said. “You’d grieve longer over a dog.”

“Oh,” I said. Nobody ever told me.

Last night we ate pasta at Rose Pistola. Before long we were talking about Madonna. Michael thinks that she is a ridiculous slut. He is too clever to say this directly, but he gets the message across. He knows I like her, that I listen to her tapes
in the gym. He’s seen the photograph from the Halloween when Lana and Yvonne and I went as Material Girls, the three of us wearing crosses and fake moles.

Michael said she was a publicity-mad media-invented dehumanized parody of a human being. I said, “Look at Howard Stern. Look at Marilyn Manson.

“Dennis Rodman,” I said, grasping at straws.

“If she were a man, no one would lift an eyebrow,” I said.

He agrees but looks upset. Every time we talk about Madonna, we end up like this. You would be surprised how often Madonna comes up.

Finally I said, “Look, this dinner is costing about eighty dollars, and I don’t want to talk about Madonna.”

That seemed to make sense to him. We had spumoni, came home, and made love. Afterward he brought me some orange juice, and we laughed about how when you hold down the Cow’s ears he looks like Karl Lagerfeld.

The copywriter down the hall is engaged, I just heard. When I saw him today in the lobby, I asked him when he was getting married.

“September twenty-first,” he said.

“How do you like being engaged?” I asked.

He leaned against the wall and said that it’s funny I should ask, because last night over dinner he had discussed postponing the wedding.

I wonder if it was before or after he had eaten. This is only about the third time I have spoken to him, so I can’t ask.

“I just don’t know if we’re compatible,” he said. He was
now leaning at a more pronounced angle, as if he might fall down. “I just think it might be better to postpone.”

Postpone, I thought. A euphemism.
Body
instead of
corpse. Funeral director
versus
mortician
. I wish I could laugh. I would like to throw my head back and laugh, for about an hour.

“I’m not head over heels in love,” he said. His eyes looked haunted. “Maybe I’m not supposed to be. Maybe this is mature love.”

I say nothing. Advice, I know, would be pointless. I am talking to someone with an arrow through his head.

“But maybe I’m just not the kind of person that’s supposed to get married. I mean last night she asked me, ‘Are you a fighter, or are you a quitter?’ ”

We both look at each other, as though we are waiting for something to happen.

“I’m a quitter,” he said. “I’ve always been a quitter.”

When he slumped back into his office, he looked exactly like a man who is about to pull a .38 out of his desk drawer and shoot himself. But that would be too neat. It’s much more interesting than that, I understand.

Last night on the phone Ilene told me she doesn’t want us to throw rice. She said it makes birds explode, which in turn spreads disease. She said she would turn right around and go back to New York if we did it. She said, “That’s all I ask.”

“That’s it? That’s all you ask?” I said. I was hoping to get some sort of verbal agreement.

“For now,” she said.

I have created this, is what I thought. This is what my toadying has brought about. All the little cards and letters and Harry and David I felt it necessary to send her.

Reuben said he once had a woman patient whose mother-in-law was coming to stay with her and her husband for the first time. The mother-in-law was demanding and intimidating. Despite everything Reuben tried, the woman remained terrified that the house wouldn’t be clean enough, that something would go wrong, and she would be unfavorably judged. When the mother-in-law arrived, the taxi pulled up and deposited her and her ten pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage on their doorstep. As she stepped onto the porch, the family’s golden retriever, who had just spent the morning rolling in fresh dog shit, bounded forward and jumped all over the mother-in-law.

Reuben listened to her distraught story and then said to the woman, “With a dog like that, what do you need me for?”

As usual he insists I pay attention to my feelings regarding Ilene and all of this. He claims I don’t even have to do anything, but just know what’s going on.

“What
is
going on?” I ask.

What’s nice about therapy is that I may ask direct questions. I needn’t act as if I know what I’m doing. I’ve upped my sessions to twice a week, with Reuben. I feel no shame about using every available crutch.

“You’re getting married,” he says. “You’re starting a new life, independent of your family.”

I consider how there are numerous people willing to explain diamonds to you, but no one explains this. For this you have to hire a bearded man and pay him $150 an hour.

I
was flying to a commercial shoot in New York with Clark and a producer named Micky Love. The plane was cruising at thirty thousand feet when the pilot came on the loudspeaker.

“Some of you may have noticed some fluid leaking out of the right wing of the plane.… Don’t worry, this is not jet fuel … it’s hydraulic fluid.”

I do not feel the relief that this announcement suggests I ought.

“We’ve pressurized the leak, and we have two other compartments of hydraulic fluid.”

A few minutes go by. Many people are spending a lot of time looking out at the right wing, which is steadily dripping a clear fluid. The rest of us on the other side of the plane are watching the people who are watching the wing.

The pilot comes back on, “Oh, well, hey listen—there are some storms in New York, so instead of landing at JFK, we’re going to land in Chicago.…”

Since our lifeblood is running out
, is the rest of his sentence. We finish it for him in our minds. I look at Clark, smile with what I hope looks like wry humor, and reach into my bag. This seems an excellent time for the sixteenth Valium. I dry swallow. Clark orders a double Stoli, refusing to pay. He’ll pay when we bloody land, he says.