Married Again

When Chuck and I first met, I was in love with a poet. “I’m in it for the pleasure,” I told my poet once, in a moment of bravado. The poet grinned at me. “I’m in it for the pain,” he said. It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies.

Another poet, good-looking and very intense, once asked me over lunch, “Abby. What do men want?” I was unable to answer. I said he probably knew the answer better than I did. “I want to be scorched,” he said.

After several more tries, each affair ending badly, I decided maybe I was better off alone. Well, I thought, I’ll try this one more time, and if nothing comes of it, I’ll be fine. I put an ad in the respectable New York Review of Books, and waited. Among the letters sent to me was one in particular I liked, and there was something appealing about the handwriting. I can’t explain it.

We met at the Moon Palace, a restaurant that used to be on Broadway and 112th Street. It was raining when I got there, and a man standing outside had a large umbrella. I remember thinking it was big enough for two. It was Rich. He turned to greet me. A handsome man.

Rich was nice. I don’t remember what we talked about, except we talked about everything, but I do remember thinking when I got home, My god, I’ve found the honeypot. Thirteen days later Rich asked me to marry him, and I said yes. It was sudden, as love always is, and Rich suggested that my kids might want to meet him, to make sure their mother had not gone crazy. Sarah, Jennifer, Ralph, and Catherine approved. Catherine was the only one still living with me. Just as I was telling her what Rich and I were planning, the phone rang for her. “Can I call you back in ten minutes?” she said. “My mother’s getting married.”

At our wedding, Sarah said, “You look like a prince and princess from a very small and not-that-rich country.”

It was a perfect description.

On our honeymoon, we ate grits and eggs and bacon and biscuits every morning, and I began to worry that pretty soon even my stockings wouldn’t fit. I felt like a small soft avalanche lying on top of Rich. I mentioned it to him at breakfast. “I’m afraid you can’t breathe,” I said, mouth full of grits with cheese. “If I can’t breathe,” he said with a smile, “I’ll just shift my position a little.”