I’ve been thinking a lot about being wedded, which is good, you know, as I’m about to be wedded. I get the sense the number of people who are married is not equal to the number that give the institution much thought. Am I curious enough? Antonia, remember the time you asked so many questions about the beer’s hoppiness that the bartender finally poured samples of everything on draft? Yet how many questions do we ask before we get married? We proceed into this institution with nary a curiosity. Let alone an entire flight. So many people assume it’s a step we’re entitled to take. It’s difficult to unlearn all that water. I’m referencing that parable about a fish who was asked, What is it like to breathe underwater?
“I spent a week with a woman in Chicago, waking up and finding coffee and sitting at movies we chose together. She had a husband, a family. I had a life in New York. It was a stolen season. But she was some kind of wife to me.
“Rose’s grandmother spent forty years with Rose’s grandfather and told me she never liked him. Forty years with a partner she stayed with because she never had to go too deep. She said one day a certain light fell on him as he reached for a box on the top shelf and she felt a new jolt. Love, maybe. After forty years, the marriage begins.
“One of my clients has dementia and has fallen in love with her own son. She’s hot for him, can’t wait to be close, asks him: ‘Why did you leave me?’ You tell me that isn’t real, abiding. Marriage, of a sort.
“There’s a four-paneled painting of goldfish in L.A.’s Chinatown that I love, the fish swim in their separate panels, lonely and happy, and maybe that’s why my mind is on that analogy I’m possibly misremembering. In any case, What’s water? That’s what the fish replies when he’s asked: What is it like to breathe underwater?
“Does everyone love in a different way, like flavors? Mine is pistachio and someone else’s is chocolate cereal? Am I able to love stronger and more deliberately on command, or can love only be elicited? Are there limits? Are we born with a finite amount or is our capacity infinite? I’d bet that depends on the die you’re tossed around with and end up on the table next to. Chance. Is there a way to sharpen and refine love? And all the variations between the variations? If there is, I’d like to. Or I’d absolutely not like to. I’d like to know more about it before I decide.
“You’re all nice people and I’m sorry I did this to you.”
The groom takes the microphone out of my hand. “My future wife,” he says, flushing as everyone applauds. “Always with the questions.”
On most days, beauty goes unremarked upon in these people’s lives, but on nights like this they say: I am delighted to be here. Their happiness draws a line underneath me. I am sad in a happy place. With every exultation of gratitude, I retreat until my body sits on a chair at a table, but my soul is pressed into one of the corners, struggling to breathe. The problem with the room is that it’s gorgeous and shining but people are missing.
I cross the lobby to the elevator, get in, and press the button. Between floors, I crank the emergency release, call Simone, and watch myself in the mirror leave a minutes-long message.
“I want you to know,” I say, then stall. I’ve just said the word love a dozen times yet find myself unable to utter it into her voice mail. “Please come to the wedding tomorrow. It’s not right you won’t be there. We won’t tell anyone. You’ll sit in the back. Come as a woman disguised as a man. We’ll Twelfth Night the shit out of everyone. You said yourself how easy it is for a middle-aged woman to disappear. Please. I don’t want to do this alone.” Before I hang up I say, “This is your mother.”
“Is everything all right?” The concierge’s voice drifts through the speaker.
“You really need to get this elevator under control.” I swipe tears from my cheeks. “Enough is enough. I’m trying to understand,” I say. “I’m doing my best.”
“We know you’re trying and we appreciate it.”
“One person can only be so forgiving.”
“You’ve gone out of your way,” the voice agrees.
“How hard is it to get someone to fix this thing for real? James or whoever.”
The voice sounds like it’s crying. “We’re sorry,” it says. “We don’t mean to ruin anything.”
“Now I’m supposed to feel bad because you’re crying?”
“No. We did this to ourselves.”
“You did,” I say. “Making your bed and all. Lying in it.”
“We’re resetting it. You’ll be down in a jiffy.”
“A jiffy.” I curse.
The reset elevator descends to the lobby. The doors open to reveal my family in hues of tipsiness. Seeing me they quack with delight, join me on the elevator. Everyone is thrilled. The groom and I return to our room where I remove my jewelry and clothes. He pulls down his underwear and chucks it with his toe. The graying hair against the paleness of his chest always surprises me, as opposed to mine, dark on dark. He tells me he’s been working out for me and I say he looks great, but I wish there were more of him, that even my widest embrace couldn’t hold all of him. He places his hands on my hips and positions me next to him.
“Your skin.” He kisses my shoulder. “I’ve missed it.”
“I called all week,” I say. “Where were you? There were things I wanted to talk to you about.”
He stops, aggravation dusts his smile. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Yes, I say, because he is due for it, and I’ve promised. We don’t have sex often because his work makes him tired. I like this because it allows us to ignore other, bigger problems.
He appreciates everything as he climbs me: thighs, stomach, breasts. There is nothing technically wrong with how he touches me. He’s not strong enough to plank above me so he props himself on one elbow. From that fortified position, he enters me.
My subconscious has at least ten working, active planes. One conducts everyday business, hands money to the ticket girl. Designs appropriate responses to banal conversations. On the daydream plane I receive an award for courage, take my seat, am called onstage to receive it again. On another, an endless film of regrets: I refuse the childhood girl who wanted to be friends because her ugliness scared me. A boy gifts me tickets to a concert to which I take another boy. In the childhood plane my mother looks up at my entrance to a room and her expression remains unchanged.
The list-of-worries plane: climate change, terrorist attack. The rerun-of-great-sex plane—pulled hair, he holds me in a straddling position while he stands. Napping with my childhood dog. My mother looks up at my entrance into a room, her expression unchanged. One plane intones random phrases: THE BRIDE DOES NOT LIKE ALMOND. YOU COULD BRAISE BEEF IN MILK, I SUPPOSE.
YOU ARE HAVING SEX, says the practical plane, to remind me of the body, both mine and the one moving part of itself farther into me. I’m pleased he is close to orgasm and hope it will be over soon.
One plane, buried in the underground layers, works on philosophical tangles like what it meant when Rose said, “Don’t worry about me.” Conclusions I’m not ready for are secreted in deeper planes. The upturned-penny plane tries positive outcomes: promotion, connection to nature. My mother looks up at my entrance to a room.
YOU ARE HAVING SEX.
My clients’ injuries have destroyed many of these planes. A meteor careens through the framework of a skyscraper, shearing the beams in half. Thoughts halt in the middle. The structure sways. Only Danny’s literal plane remains. He is no longer funny. Post-its act as surrogates.
YOU ARE MAKING RICE.
Danny in his gently pulsing room of Post-its, and good sex, and how I should have gone with the boy who gave me the tickets, and said yes to the girl, the career of Ewan McGregor with its nebulous ebbs and flows. Like the Internet, simultaneous and indifferent. I shake back into my body and the groom comes into me, eyes wide and focused on the headboard.
He gives me a satisfied snarl. The phone rings.
“You’re going to get that?” he says. “You never answer your phone.”
On the other end a frantic woman asks if I’m there. “It’s Clover,” she says. “Danny’s wife.” She pauses and the details of her return to me: she borrows Danny’s meds to sleep, hair box-dyed a color called Spring Break. “I came from the hospital,” she says. “I was at the house earlier. Danny’s lunch was staying down, which I took as a good sign. He had a bug all week. The doctor said something was going around.”
The groom slides out of bed and crosses to the bathroom in the pallid light.
It is not uncommon for clients’ relatives to call to relay simple things like they would in a diary. “Clover?” I say. “Are you okay?”
“I came back from my meeting and he told me my sister had called. I think he wanted me to be on the phone when he…”
The groom curses in the bathroom, a dropped metal thing. I have a sister now, too, I think. To Clover, I say, “When he what?”
“He waited until I was on the phone,” she says. “I guess he thought that’d be a good way for him to.”
“For him to what?”
“For him to. He shot himself.”
She describes the smell of burning, the smear of blood still on her. The groom draws the curtains, revealing the lake and sky. I clamber under the sheets, still naked. Thousands of miles above, a plane glides out from a bank of navy clouds. Clover says, the nurses. The name of the hospital. The plane reveals itself again. I think of the passengers, feet swinging over plastic seats, watching movie screens above the city’s grid. The conflation of tin and sky. For a moment, Danny is a small thing seen from thousands of miles above. I’m not certain I know him or the woman on the phone who is overcome with tears. I tell her I’ll come to the hospital and hang up.
“One of my clients shot himself,” I say. “He’s at the hospital.”
“He’s alive?” the groom says.
“No,” I say.
He frowns. “If he’s dead, he wouldn’t be at the hospital.”
“He was still alive when they … Is this the fucking point?”
“I don’t know why I’m arguing. I’m sorry.”
I pull my dress on and fasten the important buttons, leaving the subsidiary ones for the elevator. “I’m going.”
“You can’t. It’s the night before our wedding.”
I lace my boots. “I’ll take a car. I won’t be long.”
“At least give me a hug,” he says.
I lean against him, he pulls me in. “My hardworking girl. So dedicated to the most vulnerable among us.” There are moments when he says the right thing so convincingly I can’t believe him.
“It sounds like you’re running for office,” I say.
“You’re a mean girl.”
I appreciate this honesty and think about it. I still think about it.