Joe e-mailed me later that night:
April 22
Dear Anna,
If you had asked me a couple of months ago, I would have dragged you to the nearest judge. But I have to wonder if it’s going to stick this time. I think you owe it to both of us to find out.
Gus and I talked about you. He wasn’t exactly wordy, as you know. “She’ll come around,” he told me. More than once, he mentioned that you’ve “got guts,” the supreme compliment. We fixed a busted altimeter together and argued over his conviction that if I had guts of my own, I’d pursue you until you gave in.
Your withdrawal was tough on me, as was losing my father so soon after finding him again. I’m pretty beat up. For the time being, I think we should spend some time together and see how things go.
Love,
Joe
The first thing I noticed was that he signed off with
Love
instead of
Your.
I wasn’t certain it was a good sign. I sat in my room listening to Vivaldi until long after I heard Ma close her bedroom door. Of course Joe would feel this way. Was I imagining that he’d fly down here tomorrow with a wedding band, all gratitude and joy? It was tempting to compose an e-mail assuring him of my constancy and listing all the reasons why we shouldn’t delay. But Vivaldi was reminding me that the seasons came around again and again regardless of how frantically we humans behave, and that possibly Joe was right about being patient. Maybe I
was
in the grip of a symptom. Perhaps grief for Gus had impelled me to reach for a union I couldn’t really sustain. So I sent him a note that said:
Fair enough. When do we start?
He didn’t show up in New York right away. I talked to myself a lot during that period. Grant actually caught me at it on the street a couple of blocks from school. He must have been shadowing me for a while.
“Talking to our little imaginary friend, are we?” he asked at my elbow.
I think I leapt a foot off the ground. “Don’t
do
that to me.”
He took my arm. “Just out of curiosity, Anniekins, what does Betaseron have to do with commitment, or did I hear you wrong?”
It took me a moment to retrieve my internal conversation with myself. “There’s a connection. I haven’t figured it out yet but I’m working on it. Care for a cappuccino?”
We sat outside in the spring sunshine gossiping and laughing, while all the time I was carrying on that inner dialogue, convinced that I was on the verge of some crucial revelation.
Finally, in early May as I prepared for finals, Joe called to say he’d be flying in on Friday night. “Meet me at the sushi bar?”
I agreed, and we hung up. Joe and I had never established a habit of prolonged telephone conversations. I glanced over at Ma, who was pretending to be seriously enraptured with a beer commercial. “He’s coming in,” I told her.
“Fine,” she said. Four paragraphs inside four letters. I went back to inventing an essay question that would prove provocative yet not terrifying.
Joe got to the restaurant first. It pleased me to see him sitting at the sushi counter checking out the array in the glass case. Initially, the notion of eating raw fish had disgusted him. “If it swims, cook it,” he told me.
“Oh, come down out of the mountains, country boy,” I’d complained. “You’re a New Yorker now.” He gave it a try, and soon became an enthusiast. It pleased me that I had opened his world just a little, considering how much he’d expanded mine.
I slid next to him and we exchanged a light kiss. We were both feeling the constraint of absence and of unresolved questions. Furthermore, it seemed uncouth to lock lips within the hushed walls of Japanese propriety. In fact, we barely spoke, other than to order our food. Joe was wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and a blazer. Even when the fabric brushed my arm, I felt a thrill. I ignored it because of the conversation in my head, which was proceeding full throttle. No sake for me either. I felt so close, so close to something. Not that I could have articulated what it was, but inside my head there was music building to an almost unbearable pitch, along the lines of Ravel’s
Bolero
where the suspense is enough to make you stop breathing.
It happened over the
tamago.
As soon as the yellow rectangles arrived on my palm-leaf platter, I turned to Joe and interrupted him in midsentence.
“Okay, Joe, this is what it is.” I kept the elation out of my voice for fear he’d think I was being hysterical or symptomatic. “I wasn’t ready to believe that I had MS. I know it sounds crazy, but I just couldn’t accept it, even after five years.”
He was gawking at me with one hand in the air, balancing a shimmering sliver of yellowtail.
“You presented a problem for me,” I said, “because around you there was no way to duck being sick.” He just kept staring. I reached out, captured the fish from his fingers and popped it into his mouth. I could sense that the businessman sitting next to me was leaning in, trying to catch every word. I always hope that I’ll get to sit next to a conversation like this, but all I get are discussions about interest rates and municipal bonds.
“Are you with me here?” I asked Joe.
“I’m trying,” he said.
“It seems so obvious to me now,” I said.
“But what’s changed?”
“The injections symbolized something. I used my initial reaction to Betaseron as an excuse to avoid them. Dr. Klewanis tried to tell me. Ma tried. I didn’t want to hear about it. But after this last episode, I was finally able to commit to them. It took a while, but whatever had me by the throat—I suppose it was denial—loosened and let me go.” I ran out of steam for a minute. I was feeling wildly stimulated and exhausted simultaneously, a bewildering mix.
“What you’re telling me,” Joe said, “is that you couldn’t accept me until you accepted your illness.”
I laughed at the brevity of his totally accurate summation and gave him another kiss, with a little voltage this time. I figured the restaurant would forgive us. Clearly, we were in the midst of something important. When a waitress came to ask if we wanted anything else, I saw the sushi chef’s minimal gesture, waving her off.
“I don’t know, Anna. It sounds so simple.”
“That’s what they said when Elvira Hopsaddle invented the umbrella.”
“Elvira who?”
“Well, I don’t know who invented it, but you know what I mean. It’s only simple in retrospect.”
“You got me mixed in with your MS,” he said.
“You were kind of a symbol, too. I can’t help being seduced by symbols. I’m an English teacher.”
“I’d prefer to be a person.”
“Well, you are now, Joe. You always were. I just didn’t know it enough.”
The businessman was almost in my lap. I wanted to ask him if perhaps I should repeat myself in case he hadn’t heard me clearly. Joe still looked dubious. There was a kind of expectant hush at the sushi bar. I got the feeling everyone was waiting for the denouement. I know I was.
“Look, Joe, in my experience, epiphanies aren’t a dime a dozen,” I said. “I’ve been working on this one for weeks.”
He gazed off into space as if there were nothing on his mind more weighty than the dessert menu. Then he turned to me and said, “Then I think we’d better get married.”
“What a great idea,” I said. It had been a long time since I’d seen his eyes lit up like that. They were Fourth of July sparklers.
Moments later and without comment, our waitress set a fruit platter down in front of us. It looked like an abstract painting, something Christie’s would auction off for a few million dollars. The businessman shoved his card across to me. It said:
Bob Weinstein and Sons, Caterers. Weddings and Bar Mitzvahs Our Specialty.
Joe and I decided not to worry about such minor incidentals as: (a) Where were we going to live? and (b) What about my job? We just wanted to get married, the sooner the better and preferably while I was still in remission. It turned out that Bob Weinstein worked out of Orlando, Florida, but we figured we already had a pretty good source for food.
Ma commandeered Father Dewbright, who initially misunderstood and thought she was at last agreeing to marry
him.
Once he recovered from his disappointment, he was delighted to preside. Before his retirement, he had been the pastor of a gingerbread-style church off Madison Avenue, and so was able to arrange for an evening ceremony on a Saturday in early June.
That Friday night, all of our guests and members of the wedding party arrived at Ma’s apartment for a rehearsal dinner. Not that there was anything much to rehearse. But since Joe and I were planning to head off immediately after the ceremony, we figured we’d have the party the night before. Ma closed the bakery and she and Carmen cooked up a spectacular spread. There was lobster bisque and baked salmon en croute and roasted vegetables and a leg of lamb and rosemary focaccia and watercress salad and a fabulously ornate wedding cake, chocolate in honor of the groom, that was topped with an odd pair: a pilot sporting a Red Baron hat and a sadistic-looking teacher whose ruler looked like a bayonet.
My father had sent a large check and regrets due to a commitment in Toronto to tape a video called
Warm Guns and Hot Beds.
I felt he would have added a jarring note and was just as glad. I had imposed on Duncan Reese to give me away. To my surprise and gratification, he seemed deeply moved at the invitation and agreed. Steve, Celeste, Frank, and Eva flew down, and I invited Grant and Dee and Van Sunderland to hold up my end. It’s always risky to stir ingredients from the various canisters of one’s life into a single stew, but I hoped that if we spiked it with enough champagne, all would be well. As far as Joe and I were concerned, the crucial issue was the confrontation of the mothers. I was dreading a clash-of-the-Titans type of situation and had warned Ma that I expected tractability if not submissiveness on her part. I knew it was futile to request clean language. Suddenly it seemed like a better idea to just head down to City Hall, Joe and me, and forget the rest of it.
I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the absurdly impractical wedding dress Dee and I had bought, which was now hanging on my closet door. What the hell, Joe and I had weathered worse things than Norma and Celeste under the same roof. Maybe.
The intercom buzzed and Ma shouted at me to move my ass, she was tangled up in panty hose. I got up and opened the front door to Duncan Reese, Dee, and Van. Duncan wrapped me in a bear hug and told the Sunderlands that I was his “honorary daughter.” I hadn’t seen Van in three years, but other than the bald head, he looked exactly the same, with a sweet ruddy face that suggested an outdoorsman rather than an accountant. I led them all straight to the punch bowl.
“We all have to get drunk,” I said. Ma emerged to greet everyone. She barely acknowledged Duncan, an oversight considering his special kindness, so I handed him a drink and took him by the arm. We stood together by the window. The light was a mixture of pink and gold as the day began to wane. It cast every detail of the skyline into sharp focus.
“Thank you for doing this,” I said to Duncan. “You’re so good at showing up when I need you.”
He beamed at me with the kind of pride I hoped a father might feel. “What are your plans, Anna? Will you leave Cameron?”
“I can’t imagine not teaching, but I have to take this step first. We don’t even know where we’re going to live.” I turned to look at Ma who had extracted the family photos out of Dee. “It will seem very strange, not seeing her every day.” This was a subject I had hardly dared to contemplate. I knew that an era in our relationship was ending. I also knew that it was time, but that realization didn’t muffle the sound of Velcro tearing every time I looked at her.
The buzzer rang and Ma’s head lifted. She looked pretty in a light blue dress that showed off her skin. There was that ache beginning under my ribs.
“You’ll miss her very much,” Duncan murmured. Something in the way he said it was arresting. I looked up at him, but then Joe burst through the door with the upstate entourage in tow and the sight of him gave me such a jolt of pleasure it was embarrassing.
Celeste was barely recognizable. Her designer suit hung on her and she’d cut her hair shorter so that the gaunt bones of her face were even more prominent. Her glance swept the room, hawklike, until it settled on me. The muscles at her jawline clenched into a ghastly smile. Joe led her over to me and she planted a cool kiss on my cheek.
“This is Duncan Reese, who I hope you’ve noticed is wearing a Bill Blass sport jacket,” I said. No, I didn’t. But I made the introduction and watched Duncan begin to reel her in.
“I understand you’re originally from the Saratoga area,” he said. He’d done his research, presumably with Ma. “You aren’t by any chance acquainted with the Forresters, Gwen and Ralph?”
“Why, I grew up with Ralph Forrester,” Celeste gasped. “He’s the foremost real estate developer in the county.”
Hook, line, and sinker, I thought, blessing him silently before turning to the other guests. Grant was talking to Joe while munching on flatbread and shedding not a crumb. I watched for a few seconds, experiencing the strange sensation of worlds colliding, and quickly sank into maudlin territory:
My guys. My two guys. Aww.
I wasn’t permitted to wallow for long. Over by the grilled vegetables, Duncan was introducing Celeste to Ma. Of course, it should have been my responsibility to perform that particular ritual, or Joe’s, but neither of us was thinking very clearly. I could tell that despite Duncan’s formidable skill, there was a crisis brewing. Celeste’s eyes were narrowed and Ma had a dangerous flush in her cheek. I went straight to Joe. Grant swung around and nearly poked me in the eye with his punch glass.
“Boys,” I muttered, “I think it’s time to elope.” I slid my eyes in the direction of the Mothers. By now, Ma was talking, and I could see it wasn’t pretty. Duncan had hold of her arm and wore the smile of someone who was pretending to make a joke out of a diplomatic disaster. Nearby, Dee and Eva had interrupted their conversation to watch the women.