Getting Married Read online

  I met Gabrielle when I was working on getting my MBA. Gabrielle was working on her PhD in sociology at the same time I was getting my master’s. I was waiting in line to get coffee from the stand at the student union and I went to pay for my latte, handing the kid behind the counter my twenty because that was all I had. He pointed to the handmade sign that had a twenty dollar bill sketched on it with a red bar in a circle over it, like you have on no-smoking signs.

  “I know you’d prefer not to take twenties, but it’s all I’ve got,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t take it. I’ll run out of change.”

  “But you don’t understand. I’m in graduate school and I’m having a caffeine emergency. My entire future could be destroyed if I fall asleep at my final presentation tonight.”

  “No can do, lady.”

  “Here. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  I turned to see a petite woman with dark hair and glasses forking over the three bucks I needed to obtain the precious beverage.

  “Thank you, so, so much. You are a life-saver. You’re earning like a million karma points.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m a grad student too.” She ordered a latte for herself. “We have to look out for each other. I’m getting my PhD in sociology. How about you?”

  “MBA.”

  The kid behind the counter set the two lattes down. I took one and handed the girl the other.

  “I’m Gabrielle Leveska.”

  “I’m Eva Lockhart. It’s nice to meet you. I don’t have to be in class for another hour. Do you want to share a table with me?”

  “Sure.”

  We sat at a nearby table and I asked her what she was doing research on. She told me she was looking at the representation of self and social interaction in online gaming communities. Which meant nothing to me, and I said so.

  “Well, there are these games you can play online against thousands of other people from all over the world,” she explained. “You get to choose the character or persona you play these games with, and you can be male or female. The vast majority of people who play these games are men, yet many of the men choose female personas. Sometimes they’ll be given a hard time about that, but these guys will explain that they choose a female personality as a strategy because other male characters will give the female character gifts, like extra ammunition and supplies.”

  “Really? But don’t the people playing male characters know that the females are in all likelihood played by other men?”

  “Yeah, but it happens anyway. Characters even fall in love and get married online.”

  “I don’t get it. How do you get married online?”

  Gabrielle explained about online weddings where communities of characters met in cyberspace to have a ceremony and celebration. I’d had no idea such things happened, and I was fascinated to learn about this strange new world.

  We spent the next hour talking about gender and identity and how people socialize and don’t socialize with each other in an era of the Internet. It was so refreshing to talk about things other than business plans, economic forecasts, and the bottom line. I learned that Gabrielle was married. I told her that I was single and I was beginning to think I always would be.

  “What are you looking for in a guy?” she asked.

  “Someone who’s kind and funny. Someone who’s thoughtful and interesting.”

  “It’s interesting that you didn’t say anything about his looks.”

  That’s the tricky thing about befriending a sociologist. They’re always noticing that kind of thing.

  “Well, I don’t want him to look like an ogre, but attraction is such a tricky thing. I’ve dated some really good-looking guys who were boring as hell and I just didn’t care how chiseled their cheekbones were or how ripped their abs, I just can’t be attracted to someone who’s nothing more than a pretty face.”

  “Well, I know a guy I think you might like, and he’s pretty cute, too.”

  She invited me to join her and her husband, Dan, for a dinner where I’d meet Steve. It turned out Steve just didn’t do it for me, but Gabrielle and I kept calling and seeing each other. I didn’t get a boyfriend, but I did get a girlfriend.

  Her relationship with Dan was the first marriage I saw that I thought, wow, I want what they have. Most married couples I knew seemed bored and irritated with each other most of the time, like the spark had died a long time ago. I’d take years of bad dates before settling for something like that.

  But not Gabrielle and Dan. They’d been married for three years at that point and had been together two years before that, but they still were passionate about each other and they still really knew how to joke around and have fun together. They were both good about expressing their feelings. Several times I witnessed Gabrielle saying to Dan or Dan saying to Gabrielle something like, “When you said (or did)—————, it made me feel—————.” Then apologies and “you’re rights” and “I didn’t mean that at all. What I was trying to say was…” would flow. It was so much different from my parents’ marriage, where the argument style was for Mom to yell and scream and cry and bring up every possible way my father had wronged her over the fifteen-year course of their relationship and my father wouldn’t say a word and wouldn’t listen, either. (Truly, it’s a wonder my parents stayed married the fifteen years that they did.)

  Gabrielle and Dan had a true partnership. They laughed together, played together, and exchanged passionate kisses with applause-worthy regularity. Through the years I spent with Rick the money-grubbing skinflint, I compared our relationship to Gabrielle’s and Dan’s and found it wanting. I despaired of ever having what they had.

  Then, about six months after I’d broken up with Rick, when I was in one of those I’m-going-to-be-single-forever-and-never-get-laid-again moods, I went to a party with Dan and Gabrielle. Gabrielle went out to get more beer, and I volunteered to get more ice from the freezer in the basement. Dan followed me downstairs. He asked how my love life was going.

  “It’s not.”

  “Relationships are hard. Gabrielle and I have become more like brother and sister these days.”

  I knew for a fact they had an active and interesting sex life—Gabrielle gave me juicy details regularly—but before I could even make a confused expression, Dan plunged his tongue so far down my throat he could have used it to clean out my small intestine.

  I pushed him off me, demanded to know what the fuck he thought he was doing, and raced up the stairs, leaving the bag of ice behind me. I didn’t know what to do, whether I should tell Gabrielle or not. I tried to convince myself that he’d just been drunk and it didn’t mean anything, though he hadn’t seemed drunk.

  In my usual way, I did my best to avoid the problem by leaving the party immediately and avoiding Gabrielle and Dan for the next two weeks. Then one day Gabrielle called me crying. She’d come home to find Dan watching television with a woman in bed. They were both naked.

  She’d extracted the following information from Dan: The affair had been going on for nine months. It wasn’t his first affair, just the first one she’d known about.

  Needless to say, he was booted out on his ass posthaste.

  I knew my sorrow couldn’t compare to Gabrielle’s, but I truly was devastated. If the one relationship I knew of that I actually admired and coveted was nothing more than a trick of smoke and mirrors, how the hell could I expect to find and nurture the real thing?

  That was two years ago. The divorce was a relatively quick affair since they had no kids and no money and thus no assets to divide. Gabrielle had been a basketcase for the first year, as could be expected. She’d finished her coursework for her doctorate, but she left school without completing her dissertation, making it impossible for her to land a job doing what she really wanted to be doing—being a professor of sociology. Instead, she got a job as an executive assistant. It’s unbelievable, really, that someone as bright as Gabrielle should have a job she dislikes so much, but academ
ia gave her no skills other than teaching and research, and she can’t teach unless she gets a teaching certificate to work in a high school or finishes her dissertation so she can teach at the college level. It’s a brutal catch-22.

  “Gabrielle, my love!” I say as Will and I get out of our cars at the same time she does.

  “Hey, Eva. Hey, Will.”

  Gabrielle is looking good. Much better than she did in the days immediately following her divorce when she went around looking like a zombie, a haunted expression in her eyes. Gabrielle is cute, with a button nose and a sweet smile and gentle brown eyes that sparkle with humor. She wears glasses, but even so you wouldn’t suspect her of being the genius that she is. She can pass for a completely ordinary person who likes reality TV shows and can watch hour after hour of “The Simpsons” reruns, but if you get her started on politics or current events, she can spout complicated theoretical concepts using vocabulary words that mere mortals like myself can only wonder at.

  We walk to the backyard together and say our hellos. Following right behind us are a mom and a dad with their little girl.

  “Well, hello. And who are you?” I ask, bending down so I’m eye level with the little girl.

  She buries her face in her hands, smiling shyly.

  “This is Deidre,” the dad says. I’m sure I’ve met him before at another of Jon and Rachel’s parties, but I can’t remember for the life of me what his name is.

  Deidre peeks out from behind her hands and smiles at me. When I smile back she squeals and runs over to her father.

  Just then Rachel’s three year old, Julia, plucks a dandelion from the ground and hands it to Deidre. Deidre takes it in one hand, then takes Julia’s hand in the other, and the two run off squealing and laughing together. The entire exchange is done wordlessly.

  “That was the cutest, most precious thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” I say.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that easy to make friends as an adult?” Gabrielle says.

  The two little girls are over in the corner of the lawn by the plastic kiddie pool, tossing the dandelion in the water. Then they run off to gather more dandelions in the bobbly way of three year olds, then run back to the pool, dandelions in hand, and toss those in the water, too. I watch Rachel’s ten-year-old son across the lawn. Isaac is sweet and ridiculously brainy, excelling not just at math and science but at English and spelling as well. He is always writing horror stories. Cannibalism tends to feature heavily in his short stories. I find it a little creepy that a ten year old could be so addicted to the work of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but Rachel thinks his fiction is a good outlet for his active imagination. Both of Rachel’s children have the dark hair and blue eyes of their parents. Isaac is a cute kid, but Julia is truly precious beyond words, with long ringlets of curls, big eyes, and a smile that could charm the Devil himself.

  I turn my attention to Jon and Rachel.

  “Happy birthday, Jon,” I say, giving him a hug.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re looking surprisingly chipper for an old man of thirty.”

  “I do try.”

  And it’s true. He looks younger than he is. He has an enthusiasm toward life and a perpetual brightness in his blue eyes. It’s hard for me to think of him as a father because growing up, I associated fatherhood as being something that involved constant worrying, endless stress, a propensity for brow-furrowing, and writing lots of checks. It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of a father who is cheerful and happy.

  My exchange with him is cut off when someone else arrives and wishes Jon a happy birthday and starts telling him about the new truck he bought.

  “I’m going to grab a beer. You want one?” Will asks me.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Gabrielle?” he asks.

  “Please.”

  Now that we’re alone, Gabrielle and I look at each other and exchange dumb hmm-what-should-we-talk-about smiles. It has been tricky for me to talk to Gabrielle since the divorce. I don’t like to ask about her job because I know she hates it; I don’t want to ask her about her love life since I don’t want to rub it in that she doesn’t have one; and I don’t want to ask her if she’s working on her dissertation again since I’m pretty damn sure the answer is no, and I don’t want to make her feel bad about putting off her life dream indefinitely. One thing Gabrielle and I can usually talk about is current events and politics, but I have to be in the mood to hear about how the environment is being destroyed by evil corporations or how innocent victims are dying of AIDS in Africa or how trees are being clear-cut all across Canada (and the world) even though paper could easily be made out of hemp if the U.S. government weren’t so terrified of allowing it to be planted, and as it happens, I’m not in the mood to get depressed and angry about the injustices of the world just now.

  “Did I tell you I’ve been trying the online dating thing?” Gabrielle says, rescuing me from my deliberations over how to start a conversation.

  “No! That’s great!”

  “I figured if it worked for you, it might work for me. And guess what? I have a date for tomorrow night.”

  “Really? Cool. Tell me about him.”

  “He’s a doctor, an MD, internal medicine.”

  “So he’s smart, that’s a start.”

  “He’s cute. He’s divorced, two kids.”

  “Ooh, another divorced guy. How old is he?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “How long has he been divorced?”

  “Separated for three, officially divorced for two.”

  “Has he dated since then?”

  “One woman.”

  “Good, so he’s got the transitional woman out of the way.”

  “My thoughts precisely.”

  “How long have you guys been emailing each other?”

  “About a week.”

  “I’m so excited for you. Why didn’t you tell me you were trying the online thing?”

  “I just did! Honestly, I’d looked at a few sites every now and then over the past few months, but usually it just depressed me to see what’s out there. So many guys brag about how they are just typical guys. I don’t want a typical guy. I want more than that. It’s as if there is a large contingent of people who are afraid to be different and think for themselves. Then I saw Jeremy’s picture, and when I read his ad, I thought, what the hell?”

  “Good for you. I want a full report as soon as you get home.”

  “But of course.”

  A woman carrying a paper plate filled with food smiles and joins Gabrielle and me in our little circle.

  “Hi, I’m Lisa. I’m a friend of Rachel’s. I live just down the block.”

  “Hi, I’m Eva. This is Gabrielle.”

  “You two looked like you were discussing something interesting.” She bites into a carrot, crunching loudly.

  “We’re just talking about the joys of dating when you’re in your thirties,” I say.

  “I bet it’s not easy.”

  I take this opportunity to notice the colossal rock she’s wearing on the ring finger of her left hand.

  “Well, it’s fun when you meet a good guy. I met Will a few months ago and I’m in heaven. He’s over there.” I point to where he’s talking to Jon over an open beer cooler. “It’s been great. He’s great. It’s just been a little hard for me to deal with the fact that he’s divorced. I just have to get over it, but still, you know, it’s a little painful.”

  “That must be so hard,” she shakes her head as if I’ve just told her I have terminal cancer. “I guess I’m lucky. My husband and I got married when we were both twenty-five.”

  I nod and smile. What does she want me to say? Yes, you did the marriage thing right. I’m sorry I didn’t hop to it in my twenties; I will never forgive myself.

  Through my defensive feelings, I get this sudden flash of emotion, this sinking feeling I’m getting used goods. Nobody ever won a gold medal for coming in second. Second is just n
ot as good. Everyone knows that.

  “It’s actually kind of good that he was married,” I say. “He was with her for six years, so that cuts down on the number of sex partners he could have racked up.”

  Apparently Lisa doesn’t see the humor or truth in my comment, and she just gives me this fake smile like she just smelled something awful.

  “I’m doing the online dating thing, too,” Gabrielle says. “But it’s exactly like you say, Eva. I want a guy around my age, so I’m looking at all these guys in their thirties, and if they’re single I think, ‘why are you still single?’ and if they’re divorced I think, ‘why did you get a divorce?’”

  “It’s tricky isn’t it?” I say.

  “I’m so glad I never had to go through that,” Lisa says. “I guess that’s what you get when you put a career before family.”

  I know Lisa is the one being the bitch here, but I feel judged by her. And even though I know that when people judge other people it’s just because they’re not happy with themselves, I start feeling anxious and uncomfortable.

  “Can you excuse me for just a moment?” I say.

  I make a hasty retreat into Jon and Rachel’s house to their bathroom. I lock the door and sit on the closed toilet seat and try to steady my breathing. Why do I let people get to me like this? I lock myself in the bathroom because some judgmental stranger looks at me funny?

  Retreating is how I’ve “dealt”—which is to say not dealt—with every unpleasant thing that’s happened in my life. When my parents got divorced, I didn’t cry, or talk about how I felt, I just became withdrawn and sullen and lived my life in an emotional fog. When my senior math class suddenly got hard, I just gave up. I didn’t need the class for college, so I failed every test the rest of the semester, squeaking by with a D, thanks to some initial strong test scores at the beginning of the term. Is that how I’ll deal with things if Will and I get married and things start to get a little tough? I’ll just give up, retreat into a silent trance?

  I stay in the bathroom for several minutes, just trying to get my breathing and heartbeat back to normal. Every fiber in my body just wants to run out the front door, drive home, and dive into bed, pulling the covers tight over my head. I finally force myself to go back outside when I realize I’ve spent far too long away from the party.