So. We were married, which changed nothing at all, and would continue to change nothing at all, except for certain appearances intended to convince Uncle Sam: I left some clothes in Sara’s closet, a few instruments in her living room, a toothbrush in her bathroom. But otherwise, nothing changed.
Well, to be honest, that’s not exactly true. I had a mad crush on her, and I was secretly tickled we were married, although I wasn’t sure I should admit it, since that seemed a violation of our agreement. I know it was a marriage of convenience, but I had genuinely fallen for her. I had to keep shaking my head and reminding myself: Rory, this is for practical reasons. And then I’d see her looking at me and I’d think, I’m married to her!—and I’d get so excited I had to tickle her to have a good excuse to squeeze her. She seemed to like the excuse to squeeze me back.
So it turned out not to be as casual as I’d thought. That’s why, in part, I agreed with Sara that we just shouldn’t tell anyone, not until we were settled into it ourselves more. My family was mostly back in Ireland now, lured home by the economic boom called the Celtic Tiger and then trapped by the meltdown that followed. Sara’s family was mostly in New York or Chicago—as with me, her parents had already passed. She had an older brother lately moved to Milwaukee who would “probably flip out,” so there was no family to tell yet.
So we didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t wear rings. We never considered actually living together. We continued on with our new-romance buoyancy, enchanting and nauseating all our mates by finishing each other’s sentences, eating food off each other’s plate, practicing our secret handshake in public. We threw lots of little dinner parties in Sara’s apartment (the dog loved this, of course), taking photos for reasons we never told anyone, but the parties themselves were such great fun, and it was lovely to be toasted with equal heartiness by everyone from art-history professors to Trad musicians to plumbers. We had the honey-est of honeymoon periods. It really was romance, we agreed once the marriage certificate was stowed away in her bedroom desk. Romance is a glorious thing.
Not at all like being married.
But now what? The “marriage” was just a piece of paper, but a crucial one: the inaugural drop in a cascade of required paperwork. Sara was great with paperwork, from all those years of writing grants and convincing her bosses to hire impertinent fiddlers. A fortnight after the “wedding,” she printed out a load of government documents, as well as absurd bits of advice from advisory websites, warning us we’d be asked what color our spouse’s toothbrush was at the immigration interview.
That weekend, we huddled together at her coffee table over takeout Chinese. (Weekends I would always stay at Sara’s place because her neighbor was away, so there was nobody to feed the dog.)
When I saw all the paperwork I was terrified. I knew to expect it, but my brain just shut down. I couldn’t understand bureaucratic lingo. It was a foreign language I couldn’t penetrate.
The goal, this first night, was just to get an overview of what was ahead of us. The dog lay stretched out beneath the coffee table on her side. To avoid getting stiff, Sara and I shifted all evening up and down, now sitting on the floor (best for moo shu), now on the sofa (fine for egg rolls). The dog, whose priorities did not match ours, made it clear that when we were on the floor, Sara existed to rub her belly; when we were on the couch, I was nudged into taking over this activity with my foot. I was less compliant than Sara.
Sara read over the forms and commentaries in concentrated quiet, and I pretended to do likewise. The phraseology was a load of mundane shite. Then it occurred to me that maybe some lonely government bureaucrat was an undiscovered poet, and had secretly encoded a complex rhyming scheme into the directions, so obscure and obfuscated that only a close reading of the text would reveal the scansion. I devoted myself to such a process for a good half hour, seeking rhythm where Sara sought meaning.
She had more success than I did.
“. . . evading any provision of the immigration laws,” I tried under my breath, then huffed in disgust and gave up. “This is shite,” I said, tossing the form down onto the table.
“Are you reading it closely?” Sara asked.
“Of course,” I said, without defining what I considered “close.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Every man dreads when a woman asks that.
“I’m thinking this crowd will not be writing for the New Yorker.”
She gave me a look. Then she said, quite grim, “Rory. I think we might actually have to live together for a while to pull this off.”
What? Panic. Slack face. I hadn’t lived with anyone, not even a roommate, for years. I talked out loud to myself too much. I didn’t want my morning routine of espresso-and-crossword messed with, it was the only thing that kept me from smoking. I didn’t like anyone touching my laundry. “Why would we have to do that?” I asked.
“If we’re married, we need the same address, for starters,” she pointed out.
“We knew that. The plan was to use one address and pretend we both live there.”
“And we should have the same health insurance, the same doctors—who’s your doctor?”
“I don’t have a doctor,” I said, feeling defensive. “The Irish don’t get sick, we just drop dead from alcoholism or existential melancholy.”
“Well, you need a doctor because according to Form . . . hang on . . .” She wiped her left pointer finger on a napkin and poked at the papers. “Form 693 says you have to get a complete physical.”
“I am already completely physical.”
She rolled her eyes and soldiered on. “We should get on the same car insurance. Open a joint bank account—”
“A what?” I coughed, now really choking down panic. “For what? We don’t have any joint expenses. You’re taking this too far. My cousin and I weren’t bothering to do anything this involved. If we have to move in together, let’s at least ease into it.”
“The more shared expenses there are, right away, the better. We need a paper trail. That’s why we should probably live together—not forever, but until you’ve gotten the conditional green card. Three or four months at least. Get our mail at the same place, share the utility bills, that kind of thing.”
I was horrified. Getting married was one thing—but actually living together? We’d only been dating a few weeks. That’s not nearly long enough to get over the distraction of another person’s scent on the sheets, to become immune to the foreignness of each other’s bathroom rituals and daily tics. I loved waking up next to her, but then slipping away at dawn to return to a purely Rory-centric world. I loved the frisson that came of not knowing exactly when or where we’d see each other next. Living together would ruin that.
“What do you want, frisson or a green card?” Sara asked, when I said so.
I pursed my lips. Suddenly priorities became clear: okay, so we’d have to live together, temporarily. However, independent of my laundry peccadilloes, and the talking-to-myself, and the espresso at my local café, it would be a bloody pain to pack up and move my LP collection. “You should move to my place,” I said decisively, “because it’s bigger and closer to the T.”
She almost spat from the laughing. “Are you serious?” she asked. “What about Cody?”
As usual, the dog had slipped my mind. “There are plenty of dogs who just stay in all day,” I said.
“They don’t allow dogs in your building. I saw a sign. So you’ll have to move in here or we’ll rent a new place together.”
Internal alarm bells sounded so loud I got a sudden headache. “You sound terribly casual,” I said. Mentally I was trying to guess how many boxes I would need for the LPs.
“I’m just trying to do this thing right,” said Sara.
“I have lived in the same place for ten years,” I said.
“That’s not really true, you sublet it several times to move in ill-advisedly with certain girlfriends,” she said. “Remember who you’re talking to? I knew your entire romantic history before I was ever close to being a part of it.”
“But all my stuff was there. I knew I could always come home to my stuff,” I said. “Are you telling me to give up the place where all my stuff has lived for ten years, after us dating for a few weeks?”
“I said we can move in somewhere new together if that helps. As long as it’s dog-friendly.”
“It doesn’t help, and besides—the dog decides where we live?” I said. “It’s all about the dog.”
“Actually, it’s all about the green card,” she replied without looking up from the form. “They want to know if you’re a communist,” she said, reading. “Or a Nazi.”
“Don’t change the subject, please. This isn’t going to work if you keep making me feel like I’m beholden to you,” I warned.
“I’m not doing that,” she said.
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
“You—” I grabbed a couch cushion, slammed it to my face, and briefly screamed into it with the frustration. God, that felt better. I lowered the cushion. “You are,” I said calmly.
“I’m not. But I’m not willing to give up my dog so you can get a green card.”
“You should have thought of that before insisting that I marry you,” I said.
“You should have thought of that before marrying a woman with a dog,” she retorted.
I moved in with her.
No, let’s be clear about this:
I moved in with them.