Chapter 14
Tulah meets Ray
Tulah’s Snow Journal
Thursday, January 22, 1998 #140
It’s snowing – fluffy, like down. It seems to hesitate, as if it’s confused about where it’s going. There was a moment today, up on the Beehive above Lake Agnes, when the snow was actually falling up! A breeze was pushing it up the mountain and the snow was rising up all around us. It was confusing at first and then it was amazing. And I mean ‘amazing.’ It was verging on unbelievable. Grandma Frannie would have loved that snow. It was way beyond magic. I thought I was going to lose my mind. Brenda and Justine were stunned into silence, which is something. Brenda asked me if the snow was falling up. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It is.’ It was like some movie where gravity stops and everything floats. For a few seconds everything is magic. The Inuit call this snow priyakli. That is, if you can believe anything on the internet. Anyway, priyakli is snow that looks like it’s falling upward.
We’re studying poetry at school right now – all the forms of poetry. Eventually, I will have to teach a poetry unit to my students. I found out last week that I love Haiku. Not sure I could ever write one that is any good, but I really enjoy reading them and thinking about them. This one is from a Japanese poet named Basho.
This snowy morning:
cries of the crow I despise
(ah, but so beautiful!)
See? The snow makes everything beautiful!
I’m in a room by myself. Sandi backed out at the last second so I’m stuck paying for this double room. I have two beds. I have choices. It’s okay. I also have a lake view. Okay, I have a lake view across a parking lot and it’s partially blocked by a massive chateau but still, it’s a lake view.
Tulah is staying with a couple girlfriends at a small hotel near Lake Louise called Deer Lodge. The Chateau Lake Louise imposes itself at the end of the lake and her hotel is a couple hundred metres down the road from the Chateau. She is excited about being in the mountains. She and two girlfriends were going to ski up behind Mt. Fairview but the avalanche warnings spooked them and eventually chased them into the communal hot tub on top of their hotel. Brenda is majoring in psychology and Justine is a junior writer with a communications company and is now back at university, adding a degree to her experience. They take a couple bottles of wine and some plastic beer cups to the tub and stay there all afternoon. It’s not swanky by a long shot but Tulah has learned that the astounding moments in life are hardly ever swanky – those moments come when you are open to adventure, when you open yourself to life, and playfulness. It snows on and off all afternoon and they watch as the mountains appear, and disappear.
Later that night, they are at the Walliser Stube, one of the bars in the Chateau Lake Louise. It is a dark, narrow room with chandeliers that were made from the interwoven antlers of deer and elk. They are drinking a bottle of wine – the cheapest wine on the menu because they are all students. Men have already hit on her friends, they’ve had drinks sent over three times. They wind up sitting with a group of accountants from a firm that is on a leadership retreat at the Chateau.
For the most part, the accountants get nowhere with the women. Brenda wants to stay and see what happens with one of them but her friends scoop her up and put her to bed. She is a compliant drunk. Once they have Brenda tucked in, Justine announces she’s done as well. Tulah says goodnight and crosses the hall to her room. The snow is falling past her window – twisting through the hotel lights and the street lights in the parking lot. Even though she is exhausted, she bundles up and heads for the lake. It’s a ten-minute walk and soon she is at the edge of the lake, with the surrounding mountains looming, the Chateau behind her, and the snow everywhere. The Chateau seems as if it’s huge from where she’s standing, but she knows looking down from the Beehive above Lake Agnes, it is a speck of trivial civilization compared to the surrounding mountains. Just now, with the cold seeping into her bones and the snow coming down harder than before, the Chateau, with its warm yellow light, is a comfort. The quiet is astounding. It aches through her and she feels the aloneness of standing on the hard shore of a frozen lake with snow falling. It’s as if the snow steals any uttered sound and she can see only as far as the lights from the Chateau. The mountains are only an assumption. When the cold starts to penetrate she decides to cut through the Chateau on her way back. She can warm up and then make the walk to her hotel.
There is a man vacuuming near the entrance and he does not see her as she climbs the stairs to the upper lobby. She hears the music and at first, she thinks it’s a radio, or a stereo in a back room. She keeps walking toward the music and discovers it’s the sound of a piano and there’s a pure melancholy to this music that draws her in. She hesitates at the door to the ballroom. Someone is playing a piano inside. Tulah is tired and cold, and certainly not in the mood for romance. She still has to walk through the snow back to her hotel. But she is curious about this melody.
An hour before Tulah’s walk to the lake, Ray found the piano in the corner, at the back of an empty ballroom. He was looking for a way through – a way to get outside and find a quiet spot to have a drink; a place out of the snow where he could sit for a while. The piano, covered by a dusty quilted cover almost stopped him from playing but it wasn’t secured. He pushed the cover out of the way and sat down. He had three bottles of beer that the bartender had slipped him. Ray offered to pay her for the beer but she wanted nothing. “They fell and broke,” she said, winking. She passed him the bottles and he slipped them into his jacket pockets. She was flirting. He had the money. It was as if this bartender was looking for an opportunity to be kind, or flirtatious and he was it.
The piano, a Steinway that was surprisingly in tune, was a joy to play. There was such a clarity to the notes. It sang in the room but was not so crisp that the sound cut. It was full and well rounded. It was neither crystal clear, nor muddy.
It’s dark in the room. The snow falling through the hotel floodlights and then sneaking through the windows creates a dim veil of something resembling light. He does not need much light to play the piano. He has no idea what he’s doing. Except a riff on the blues – a sort of bastard blues and there are no wrong notes tonight. He has pre-forgiven himself for any wrong notes, and there’s no order to what he plays. It’s just whatever he feels. Ray was playing with a bass line – trying to get his left hand to go unconscious so his right could fool around. He was not much of a piano player at all, but he loved the sound of a piano – the thousands upon thousands of potential combinations, and melodies, and harmonies.
He loses track of time. The music allows him to drift and so he is lost inside a Bm9 when the light swings into the room, and then disappears. He knows someone has come in, or someone has opened the door and decided not to come in. He doesn’t care. He’s not performing. This is for him. Until this moment, he believed he was alone and this is exactly what he will continue to believe, until there’s a voice, or a face, or both. He hopes whoever it is decides he’s terrible, and leaves as quietly as they entered. Or, if it’s security come to tell him to stop, well, there’s nothing he can do about that.
Tulah sits in the darkened room, listens, and drifts. She thinks about her grandmother, and the snow. The snow has become something other than what it is and it is because of her grandmother. It’s a duet of joy and missing. After twenty minutes, she approaches the piano and Ray stops playing. It’s too weird for him to keep playing with this woman standing there looking at him – waiting for something. She is wearing a grey tuque and a full-length shearling coat that is too old for her and yet, she makes it work.
“Who are you?” she says.
“I’m Ray,” Ray says, smiling.
“Tulah,” she says. “I’m, I’m sorry I interrupted, it’s just, it was beautiful. What you were playing was beautiful.”
“It’s just a riff on the blues,” he says. “It’s nothing.”
“Well, it sounded a bit more than nothing.” She hopes she isn’t gushing as much as she thinks she is.
Ray looks at her. She’s wearing what looks like pyjama bottoms under her coat.
“That’s an interesting fashion statement.”
She giggles. She’d forgotten about the pyjamas. “Just doing my bit to start a trend, you know.”
“Ninja turtles?”
“Like I said, it’s not a trend yet, but soon. I can feel it’s going to catch on.”
Ray decides he likes this woman. She’s quick and pretty. “Hey, I have a couple beers, if you’d like a drink. They’re probably warm.”
“Yeah, I would love a drink.”
“Oh, yeah? Okay.” He hands her a bottle and she twists the cap.
“What should we drink to?” she says.
“To the snow,” he says, as if she is foolish for thinking a toast could be about any other thing. He holds up his bottle. “It’s everywhere and it’s beautiful and it can’t be avoided.”
“That’s a perfect toast,” she says.
“I come from a long line of toasters. Bread has always feared me.”
“What? Oh, bread. Oh, God that’s bad.” She scrunches her face.
“Years from now, when I’m telling the story of how we met to our kids, your utter confusion over my dumb joke will be one of the highlights.”
“Children?”
“Yes. You remember the future don’t you? A boy and two girls. Ned, Hannah and Ruth.”
“Hannah is born first,” she says. “Ned and Ruth are the twins.”
“Twins. Ouch.”
“Child birth is painful. Always,” she says.
“Twins, though.”
“Well, they don’t come out at the same time.”
“I know that,” he says. “I’ve seen kittens being born.”
“Where did Ned get his name? I can never remember.”
“Uncle Ned. My mom’s brother. When I was a kid, he made promises about things, and he never broke a promise.”
Time compresses and becomes a small blue thing with both of them inside. They sit near the piano and talk. They share themselves. He is pre-law, she is in Education. She has a sister named Alesha and her parents are divorced. He is an only child who was adopted. She loves Thai food. He was a vegetarian for a year because of a woman. She had a friend who died in a plane crash over the South China Sea. They share the absurdities of their lives, though they do not think of these details as absurd – they think they are the fascinating bits. She has always wanted to sing opera. He has a friend who is a singer in New York. He’s been to Europe three times to visit an aunt in Zurich. She’s been to Hawaii.
At around 4 a.m., Tulah is exhausted. “I like this,” she says. “I like you. You should come up to my room. We can keep talking… and see.”
Ray smiles. “I would love to accept that offer. But I like you enough that I want to take baby steps. Is that corny?”
“No. That’s not corny.” She stops. “Oh God, I’ve come off as a floozy.”
“Forget about judging yourself. I projected us into the future, with kids and the last time I checked, you can’t buy a baby – you have to make them. You have to have fleshy union. You know, coitus?”
“No, I’ve been too forward. I stepped over a line. It’s because I’ve been drinking.”
He giggles a little bit. “I’m not judging. It’s a really tempting offer. I’m just saying I’d like to go slow with you, because this has been, well, it’s been brilliant.”
“So, what would be the next slow step?”
“A goodnight kiss, a hug and a promise of more – breakfast maybe?” he says.
She leans in quickly and kisses him hard, but lets it soften, and it becomes a fine kiss. It becomes the kind of kiss that doesn’t want to end, the kind that ends up in only one place. She pulls away and takes ownership of her own desire.
Ray yields. Her scent is faint, but heady and unforgettable. Sometimes there is surrender inside a kiss, a softening of the idea of self. He realizes he can easily imagine a future with this woman. He wants more of her. He wants to devour.
It is still snowing as he walks her to her hotel. They are walking side-by-side along a dimly lit path and Tulah reaches across space and takes his hand in hers. She encloses his hand in her mittened hand and squeezes. She will remember how right this felt. She will never forget it. And he will remember feeling utterly smitten in that moment – as if his life was completely out of control and it was okay.
At the door, he hugs her. He holds her. She wants to kiss again but he smiles and shakes his head. She watches as he turns and starts his walk back to the Chateau. He has perhaps taken a dozen steps before Tulah stops him.
“Wait,” she says. “I’m available. I just thought you should know.”
“What?”
“I’m available. I’m not involved with anybody else. I’m not married or anything.”
“Oh,” he says. “Good. I’m also available. My heart is unencumbered.”
“Good,” she says. “I’m glad we cleared that up.”
“Me too.”
They look at each other through the falling snow. It’s as if they don’t want this to end, as if tomorrow is not certain. “Did you know that cranes mate for life?”
“What?”
“Cranes. They mate for life. It’s true. It was on the National Geographic channel. It was all about Sandhill cranes and how they mate for life.”
“Okay,” he says. “Good to know. Are you going to be okay getting to your room? Or do you need a crane?”
“100 percent fine. No problemo.”
Oh my god, she thinks. Shut the fuck up. You sound like an idiot.
She watches as he disappears into the snow. He becomes a ghost and then he vanishes. When Tulah puts her head on the pillow, she’s dizzy and she can’t decide if it’s the booze she consumed or the man. Or both. She glances at the clock on her bedside table and realizes she has promised to go skiing in a few hours. She starts to drift off but her eyes pop open. He didn’t ask about whether or not she was married, or with someone. She brought it up. As if he didn’t care, or maybe he was just as tired as she was. He said his heart was un-something. Unencumbered? Who says stuff like that? She heard ‘free.’ Maybe he trusted that if she were married or involved she would not have tried to sleep with him. That’s too much trust, she thinks. She doesn’t deserve that much trust.
“Ms. Roberts?” It is one of the young, overly polite men at the front desk. “This was left for you,” he says, handing her a folded piece of paper. Tulah stops and recognizes the excitement in her chest. His note reads: I had to leave. A family thing. I want to keep learning to know you. Cranes are beautiful, and mildly illogical birds, aren’t they? This is followed by a couple phone numbers and an email address.
Tulah tells Brenda and Justine she had a late night and asks if they would mind not skiing. They are not disappointed. They are sitting in the window of the dining room looking at Mt Fairview, though it is hardly a fair view of the mountain. It’s still snowing and the mountain is a ghost that drifts in and out of existence behind a veil of hazy white.
Brenda is confused. “What do you mean you had a late night? You went to bed the same time we did.”
“Well, you had a late night and I had a very late night.”
Justine is trying to figure out the shading of this statement. “But you went to your room.”
“Yes. I went to my room.”
“And?”
“And you would have been waking up in some accountant’s room if it wasn’t for us,” Tulah says. “We saved you from Bruce the accountant.”
“You’re changing the subject. What happened last night?”
“Nothing. I met a guy.”
“You met a guy?” Justine says.
“Yes, a guy.”
Justine places her mimosa on the table and turns toward Tulah. “Where? Was he walking around in your room? Was he hiding in the bathroom?”
“I went for a walk. It was snowing and I wanted to be out in it. I cut through the Chateau on the way back and he was there.”
“In the lobby?” Brenda says.
“No, he was playing a piano, in a ballroom, in the dark.”
Their waitress is approaching the table with a bottle of prosecco wrapped in a napkin, hoping to top-up their mimosas.
“Bring a new bottle,” Brenda says to the waitress. “Please.” She looks at Tulah. “Go on.”
She does not call him. She emails a pithy “missed you at breakfast” and they go back and forth a bit. She’s swamped at school and he’s taking care of an ailing mother, which impresses Tulah. The mother was the reason he went home early from the mountains. They set a date to meet for wine in three weeks. Despite the fact nothing happened between them sexually, apart from a bit of kissing, they’re both feeling a bit sheepish about their night in the mountains.
Two weeks later, she runs into him at a book launch in an Irish pub. Brenda’s boyfriend, Brad, has published his first novel, a book written in second person about vampires living on a space station, and Ray shows up with two women.
“Oh God, that’s him,” Tulah says to Brenda. Ray is across the room, holding a drink, his arm around a tall, slender brunette with severe bangs and a slightly shorter blonde woman in a skimpy black dress, her arm in his. He’s laughing about something. He sees Tulah and smiles as if he is delighted.
“Who?”
Tulah hisses. “The piano guy. The kiss. The snow. The mountains.”
Brenda squints. “He’s not at all how I imagined him. He’s tall. He’s with someone. He’s with two someones.”
“I can see he’s with someone. I’m not blind…”
“…He’s coming over.” Brenda turns and slips into the crowd.
“Let me see,” Ray says, “The last time we met, it was snowing and you could hear the German howitzers at the edge of the city.”
Tulah tries hard not to be amused, but she knows he’s riffing on Casablanca.
“You remembered, how lovely,” she says. “But, of course, that was the night the Germans marched into Paris.”
“Not an easy night to forget.”
“No,” she says.
“I remember almost every detail,” he says. “The Germans wore grey, you wore blue.”
She shakes her head at him. “How are you, really?”
“I’m good,” he says.
“Really? Because if you’re Rick from Casablanca and I’m Ilsa, then you’re not good at all. You’re actually damaged beyond compare. And we don’t wind up together.”
“Shit. Is that what happens at the end of Casablanca?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I always fall asleep before the end. You mean Rick and Ilsa…”
“…Nope. Doesn’t happen. But they’ll always have Paris.”
“I’m happy to see you,” he says.
“I noticed you brought two dates. That’s impressive.”
“Dates? Oh, yeah. They’re together. I came with them. They’re models – both of them. They’re a couple. Want an introduction? They’re lovely.”
“Maybe later.”
“Hey, does this meeting – which is great, by the way – in any way interfere with our planned date next week? Because I’ll cancel the jet.”
“What?”
“The jet,” he says. “I’ll cancel it.”
“Oh, we’ll see how this night goes,” she says. He’s joking about having arranged a jet, she thinks. He must be joking.
“No pressure then.”
“None whatsoever.”
The MC blurts a ‘testing-one, two, three’ and then starts a long and rambling introduction of the novelist. They stand side-by-side, sipping their drinks and Tulah wants to slip her hand into his. She wants touch. She wants more than this standing and listening. She moves her forefinger slightly in the direction of his hand – more a soft twitch than anything. Ray smiles and pushes back with his hand. They listen to the author read a passage from his book. He thanks everyone and then Ray’s dates find him and pull him to the far corner of the room. Brenda finds Tulah and starts to ask her a thousand questions about Ray, and about her feelings for him, and what did she think of Brad’s reading, and wasn’t Brad a wonderful writer.
Tulah is in a stall peeing, and she’s weighing her options. She’s supposed to go with Brenda and Brad, and a gaggle of other friends, to some bistro on 8th Street. She’s afraid Brad will corner her and ask her for her honest opinion of the book and she’ll say something stupid. Brenda had given Tulah an advance reading copy of the book a month ago and she’d breezed through it. She thought the idea was brilliant but it wasn’t well executed. There were jagged edges of missing logic and that was usually fatal for a book. Would she have stopped reading it if she didn’t know Brad? Probably. She was afraid she’d have a couple more drinks and then all of this would come spilling out – Brad would be hurt, Brenda would be angry, and she’d be deeply embarrassed.
She could go back into the pub and look for Ray. This would be a slightly safer course but also dangerous because she wants to sleep with him and she’s not ready for that tonight. Her pubic hair has gone mad, her legs are bristly and she feels bloated.
She decides she will feign a headache and go home and watch guilty pleasure TV – something mind-numbing and stupid.
Ray did not have an airplane booked for their date, as he’d threatened, and she never expected it. She thought it was lovely and whimsical. Instead of flying somewhere, they went to a concert in a church, a string quartet. Béla Bartók, Schubert, and Górecki were on the program and afterwards, they go for dinner. He made her laugh. And she could make him laugh. This is important to Tulah.
Five weeks after that date they take a leap of faith on their affections. They fly to France, to Nice, for a one-week vacation. Neither of them had much money but they made it work. Ray’s summer job was at his uncle’s greenhouse, and his uncle said, “Go. Go be young and in love in the south of France.” Tulah had been hired by a construction firm as a ‘traffic girl’. She would be holding a ‘slow’ sign for most of the summer, and that road project didn’t start until the first week of July. They fly last minute, looking for the best deal and they luck out. They find heavily discounted tickets for a flight that leaves at 2:30 a.m. Ray suggested Nice because on one of their dates Tulah mentioned she loved Marc Chagall and there was a Chagall museum in Nice.
They had planned to stay at a hostel but when they arrive, they find a dozen hotels that are inexpensive and fine. They book a room in the Garden Hotel and walk every day. They visit the Musée National Marc Chagall four times. They look at Chagall’s paintings, and his windows, and they are silent. They make a deal not to speak until they each have a glass of wine in a café, and only then do they bang their perceptions together. Only then do they talk about what they saw and felt.
On a Thursday, they buy wine and walk back to their hotel. They hold hands as they walk and it feels as natural as if they’d been holding hands for forty years. Ray does not think about the future – he is only interested in how it feels to hold hands with a beautiful woman, on a sunny day, in the south of France. Tulah wonders if they will always be able to hold hands like this, and if it will always feel this pure.
They sit in the courtyard of the Garden Hotel, in the bright 2 p.m. sun. The courtyard is an enclosed sanctuary with the hotel on three sides and high stone wall protecting it from the cacophony of Nice. Ray removes one of the bottles of wine from his bag and sets it on the table beside his journal and a book. He brought Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita with him because it was a book he’d skipped in his English 303 class and he’d been intrigued by the discussion. It was a catch-up read.
“I’ll see if I can find a corkscrew and glasses,” he says. But before he can stand up, the maître d’hôtel, a man named François Houle, appears with two glasses. “Monsieur,” he says. “Please, allow me.” He looks at the wine, a Château de la Terriere Brouilly, without judgement, and proceeds to open it for them. Ray had picked the bottle off the shelf because he liked the heft of the word brouilly. And, it was inexpensive.
When the maître d’ first appeared, Tulah thought they were going to be told they couldn’t drink their own wine in the garden. She thought they’d broken some rule. She thought they would have to buy their wine from the hotel. But he seems delighted that they are there in the bright garden sharing a bottle. As if it’s natural to do so. He unfurls the umbrella beside their table so there is the option of shade and then he disappears – he ducks back into the hotel.
Tulah drops her sunglasses from her hairline into place, and smiles.
“Chagall and his blues,” she says. “Those blues are so deep and rich, I get lost when I look at that colour.”
“And those five paintings with that amazing red colour.”
“The Song of Songs cycle – those were for his wife.”
Tulah has decided she will smoke cigarettes on this trip, just a few, scattered throughout the day, and not out of desperation, but rather in concert with a desire for elegance. She loves the look and feel of a woman sneaking a cigarette. She thinks she looks European when she smokes and this pleases her. She does not admit any of this to Ray.
She limits her smoking because she loves the head rush of a first cigarette and does not want to abuse this feeling. Of course, she knows how terrible smoking is – the damage it does, but there is something reckless and romantic about it too. This moment seems like a good time to be elegant, so she takes out the package of Gauloises Blondes and pulls out a cigarette.
The maître d’, once again, shows up as if by magic, with a lighter. As she has seen in movies, Tulah touches his hand as she lights her cigarette.
He glances at the book on the table. “I can see Monsieur is a reader of distinction. Has Monsieur read Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires. It is an extraordinary book. I would recommend it…how is it in English? Vigoureusement.”
“Vigorously,” Tulah says, pleased with the recovered remnants of her high school French.
“Oui, vigorously.”
“Merci,” Ray says, as he flips open his journal and scratches the name of the book onto the page.
The maître d’ watches Ray write. “Non,” he says. “Please allow me.” He takes the pen and writes out the name of the book. “This book will bring you pleasure. Though, I do not know if it is translated.”
He pours a little more wine into each of their glasses and when he is gone, Tulah smokes quietly for a while. A French police car passes the hotel with its donkey-braying siren, a sparrow pecks the ground a few metres away, and she takes a sip of her wine. “The air is yellow here,” she says. “It’s like we’re inside a Chagall painting – with those muted yellows of his – you know? The yellows that are bold and quiet at the same time.”
“If this was a Chagall painting, we would need a blue horse, or a red horse,” Ray says.
“And our hands,” she says. “Our hands would have to be deformed – our fingers would look like bloated sausages.”
“Yes. His hands are horrible but it doesn’t matter because there is so much desire.”
Tulah giggles. “And we would have to be naked and embraced in a corner somewhere – barely noticeable.”
“Like a beautiful afterthought,” Ray says. “And there must be flowers, and birds.”
“Lots of flowers,” she says. “And perhaps I should only have one breast.”
“Well, one breast is more than enough, but, in theory, two are more fun.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” Ray says, lifting the bottle from the table. “Here, have some more wine and then perhaps we can retire to our room and investigate this theory.”
They have been dating for a year and have just started to talk about living together. They’re spending a lot of time together, and rarely sleep alone. In September, Ray has to be in Sacramento for a Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Law Conference, so they go together and add an extra week at the end, to explore the area. Ray attends the conference and Tulah catches up on her reading. After the conference, they wind up in the Lime Kiln Valley, looking for Zinfandel wine.
On their first night staying in a bed and breakfast attached to a vineyard, Ray and Tulah wander away from the guesthouse and find themselves near the staff dormitory. Jesús Patiño is playing a guitar and his girlfriend, María Guadalupe, is singing. There are perhaps twenty people around a fire, listening. The song is honest and melancholy, and when it ends, they move closer to the fire because they want more. The Mexicans offer them wine, and beer, and stilted conversation. They try to meet in the middle between English and Spanish so neither language is fully spoken. At midnight there are only a few workers left because they start early in the morning and it’s backbreaking work.
Each night after this, Ray and Tulah show up at the fire to listen to the music and talk. Some of the workers are less than thrilled about this invasion of their private time, but they seem to relax when Ray tells them he is putting himself through school by working as a gardener.
The third night at the fire, a man named Juan gets down on both knees and proposes to his girlfriend, Gabriela, who bursts into tears and knocks Juan over with her enthusiasm. Ray and Tulah are included in the celebration. They dance and sing, and are happy for the newly engaged couple.
Later, in bed, Tulah turns to Ray. “I love it that we were there tonight, but what if she’d said no, or that she needed time?”
“It’s risky,” Ray says. “That sort of love is always risky. It’s jumping from a high place and learning how to fly on the way down.”
“It would have been a bummer. A big bummer.” She has been drinking and she is over-pronouncing her ‘b’s.
“It’s about taking a leap of faith. It’s worth the risk.”
“But I wouldn’t want a public proposal,” she says. “Not that I think there’s one coming. But I think I would prefer a private proposal because then, the answer can be completely honest.” She is talking with her hands and pointing at him.
“Duly noted,” Ray says.
“And no big weddings. No, no, no. Small and dimple – simple. I want to wear a black cocktail dress.”
“No saying yes to an obscenely frilly and poofy dress?”
“Nope. Little black dress,” she says. “That’s it. And nice shoes. But that’s it. Really expensive nice shoes.”
The next day, at a restaurant in Sonora, Ray asks her. He doesn’t get down on one knee, because he’s a good listener. He tries to be low-key about it, so it doesn’t get blown out of proportion, so it doesn’t draw attention. But Tulah is beyond delighted. She jumps up and is standing in the aisle, shouting “yes, yes, yes” and by the time she is finished, the whole restaurant knows and Ray suspects people on the street know. The manager sends over a bottle of champagne.
“So much for private and honest,” he says.
“Oh, to hell with private, and anyway, I am honest. This makes me happy. I’m ecstatic.”
“So you don’t need a ring, because I can take this back. I thought maybe…” He’s digging around in his trouser pockets.
“What?”
“This.” He places the box on the table and Tulah rips the ribbon off. She looks inside at a diamond and sapphire ring.
“My God, Ray,” she says. “It’s beyond beautiful.”
The manager comes and sits down with them. Tulah slips the ring onto her finger and goes on a tour of the restaurant to show anyone and everyone. She goes into the kitchen to show the chef and out into the back alley to show their waitress, Bunny, who is taking her break with a cigarette and talking on her phone. Bunny disconnects. She is excited for Tulah, and they come back inside as Ray is opening the second bottle of champagne. Ray watches Bunny as she drinks her champagne. Even though she’s smiling, there’s sadness in her eyes.
That night, after Ray and Tulah share the news with the Mexicans, Jesús Patiño and his fiancée, María Guadalupe, kiss and hug them repeatedly. They are happy and insist the engaged couple join them at the fire to celebrate. Ray and Tulah drink a good deal of tequila, and beer, and more tequila. Afterwards, in bed, their heads are spinning as they talk about when they might get married.
“My schedule is open,” Ray says. “After the massive hangover I’m anticipating, my schedule is open.”
“Tomorrow afternoon then,” Tulah says. Her voice is resolute and fast.
“What?” He’s not sure if she’s serious.
“I’m not a big fan of long engagements.” Tulah is thinking about her girlfriend, Beth, who has been engaged for fourteen years, and counting.
“I see. You don’t like to fool around, do you?”
“Too quick for you?” She pouts as if this is a comment on the quantity of love or the quality of his love.
“A little surprising. I mean I was really thinking of a longer engagement.” Tulah’s face drops. Ray smiles and continues. “I was kinda hoping for the day after tomorrow.”
Ray was actually thinking maybe a year down the road, which would have left them loads of time to plan for a simple, elegant and small wedding.
“Well,” Tulah says, “Marriage is all about compromise, so the day after tomorrow is fine for me. Maybe we can arrange for a minister when we go into town to shop for my little black dress.”
It turns out the manager of the Lime Kiln Valley vineyard, California, knows a lot of the right people – she arranges everything, including wedding rings and a wedding dinner on the crush pad. Pastor Bob, and his wife Clarice, from Sonora, perform the ceremony, and Jesús and María act as witnesses. Pastor Bob is not the first choice, but rather the first available on short notice. He’s more Buddhist than anything else. He ends with “To say the words love and compassion is easy. But to accept that love and compassion are built upon patience and perseverance is not easy. Your marriage will be firm and lasting if you remember this.”
They gather on the crush pad, with massive oak barrels stacked six high behind them. Jesús plays his guitar and sings a song called Te Amo as Tulah makes her entrance. María Guadalupe cries through the entire service – she weeps, softly, and Ray and Tulah are not certain if these are tears of sadness or joy.