Mergings and Memories
Toward the end of that summer, Ross asked me to marry him. We had spent the spring and summer together more or less brilliantly, and he had simply turned to me one day in the car on the way home and asked matter-of-factly, “If I asked you to marry me, you’d say yes, wouldn’t you?” His sister was thrilled and started making plans, much to Ross’ amusement and my consternation. We initially thought of being married by a justice of the peace and having a small party at our house afterwards, celebrating with the Ohio contingent over the holidays, but Dottie wouldn’t hear of it. This was the first big social event in the family in a long while, so it wasn’t just ours to claim evidently. “You’re gonna have to stop her,” Ross told his alarmed fiancée. “She doesn’t listen to me.”
Dottie suggested pushing the date back until after Christmas so the thing could be done properly. I felt her meddling excessive, but Ross, seemingly floating on good feeling at my secured presence, presented an uncharacteristically tractable persona on the matter. “Look, we’re not going to do anything we don’t want to do,” he said to me at one point, which I knew was true. Our answers were amenable but vague. They didn’t stop Dottie from harassing us. Being the long-time married woman, the little sister took on the role of older sibling dispensing advice to the two of us.
These were our halcyon days. We used our intimacy as the antidote to the constant blood splattering from the world’s terrors. Against the backdrop of inhumanity we worked against daily, our acknowledgment of each other’s humanity was the key; we became secure enough, we were happy enough, to pull the labels off each other and break down the walls. Barriers gone, we stretched the limits during that period in every way we knew how. We made love as complementary beings of the same star stuff; “we are all star stuff,” as Carl Sagan would say.
When I was with Michael, I was seen only as “the girlfriend” by those around me; sadly, to him as well. There was no getting out of that box: my motivations automatically suspect, my concerns illegitimate, assigned a whole range of alien attributes whether I possessed them or not. An agent of distraction, an extractor of energy, a thief of the important things. Struggling under this burden, I abandoned my femaleness. It was not a commodity held in high regard. But I missed it, missed the soft sensuality and openness it afforded, and ended up often receiving Michael grudgingly. I was free to love only in my secret beau ideal world.
But now, this was no longer the case. Once I earned Ross’ trust, once I pushed open that gate, my true nature was given free rein. The reality of it disarmed him. Contrary to Tyler’s thinking, I didn’t want to fix Ross; I didn’t want to neuter him. Not at all. That much maligned masculinity . . . I wanted that masculinity, but not some media-driven cartoon version. I feared it was being lost to us, what it meant to be a man, fading out of everyone’s collective knowledge, but it was right there firmly entrenched in Ross, exasperatingly so at times, but I celebrated that fact, becoming a high priestess officiating at the altar of his male sensibilities. Oh, we had problems, a lot of them. We were both stubborn and strong-willed, and we were not always so nice to each other. We were also always short on cash. Why did I give away all my money to a bunch of frigging cats, Ross used to ask, only half in jest.
And then there was the issue of securing peace and quiet. To sleep, to dream nice dreams. There were the kids who would, with depressing regularity, speed around the corner of our property, the issuing bass rhythms of their music pounding so deeply and so loudly it made one’s brain vibrate against the skull, disrupting the fundamental wiring. At night they would ramp their cars up onto the gravel lot across the street from the house, park with their radios booming, and make out; looking for their heaven in action and sound. The next day the beach front would be littered with six-pack packaging and the occasional condom. I’d pick up the former; I’d give the latter a wide berth. Inside, Ross struggled for a time with nightmares—dreams of encounters with demons of unrecognizable visages. He would call out in his sleep as he fought to surface from these subconscious battles with the devils within. Jolted awake by his spooky, strangled cries, jerked up disoriented in the darkness, this was unnerving to his bed partner, to put it mildly. Sometimes I would have to shake him for several minutes before he would wake up, apologizing furiously, and we never got back to sleep after that. And when people stayed at the house, some of them victims of torture, I often heard them up during the middle of the night—that house at night held a lot of trauma repressed only for a certain amount of time. I didn’t try to imagine what was going on in their heads—the mind not in control of the memories, the brain racing without steering or brakes.
But we were better together; we were stronger, and we were unwaveringly sure of where we were going. We both blossomed in this world of ours—the silly, humorous boy could come out of the grave, wounded man; the strong woman could come out of the shy, overlooked girl. We made several road trips together speaking for HRI. When colleagues stayed at our house, we’d often all cook dinner together—congenially bumping into each other in the kitchen, usually short a key ingredient of whatever international cuisine was on for that night—and sit at the dining room table (I had reclaimed it for its original use) well into the night, drinking coffee or wine, and talking, talking. We both worked hard, and when one couldn’t handle it anymore and would spin off into his or her own world for a while, the other would take up the slack.
Ross would go out running in the mornings; I was not an early riser. Coming home from his runs in the wintertime, he would haul himself upstairs, pull off the bedclothes and whatever I had on, and throw himself on me, breathing in against my body nicely warm from lying beneath the covers, while I squealed and struggled against the sharp air he brought with him, my face pressed against his frigid clothes. We seldom called each other by our given names anymore; it was now Benny and Choo, names taken from an old cartoon show. Benny and Choo Choo. We’d lie in bed at night, our breathing deep and soft in the stillness. “Did you like that, Benny?” Choo would ask, but ofttimes Benny wouldn’t answer because he had fallen fast asleep, and Choo was left to murmur, “Oh, come on . . .” under her breath.
* * *
Jean visited us for several mild rainy days in late November, back from Africa for the holidays and a rest before heading to Europe, and gave us her blessing. She was happy for us. Her last assignment had changed her, as if she had pushed herself through some thicket and come out the other side intricately etched and worn—less transparent, but also less prickly; her bristles, her irritating air of superiority abraded off. Jean had from the very beginning given me a hard time about my work with HRI, and I’d thought for a while that she was annoyed at my stepping on her turf. Or that she couldn’t stand the fact that I was no longer unhappy. ‘How long will this last?’ she had sarcastically asked. The night she broke down on the couch, I’d assumed, was some catharsis, some breakthrough, but that was forgotten, never spoken of. After further futile attempts to understand her, to get beyond the arrogance and be given some credit, I’d finally gotten fed up with her and our leave-taking had been cold and superficial. But our time apart was transforming. After the absence, the silence traveled, neither one of us had anything we cared to prove.
We took several long walks along the beach together in the fog, two women talking about what was important to them. It was the first time we spoke as equals. I broke off our conversation at one point to push the wet hair out of my eyes, patting my cheek and declaring, “This mist is good for your skin.” Just a little quip to say, yes, the world is full of loss and the worms are waiting blind and open-mouthed, but we can appreciate the small sensualities now and again, can’t we? Had said it knowingly, almost sarcastically, yet I immediately sensed its irrelevance to Jean, and I came to understand on those walks, understand with an unrelenting certitude, the limits on the bond that could form between us—she could not connect to my underlying nature—to foresee how she would spend and end her life alone.
But her stay was sweetly nostalgic for the most part—we remembered the night at Tilden when lightning blew out the TV; I trashed Janet’s many dates. A friend, Afroze Ahmed, and a colleague of Jean’s, Dr. Philippe Ngom, joined us for Thanksgiving dinner. Jean and I had baked two pies the night before; Afroze brought with her a huge casserole of rice pilaf and Dr. Ngom a baba ghanoush-type-of-thing; we had sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, lots of good bread, and a big salad, so our table was indeed appropriately bountiful. “Are you going to carve the bird?” I asked Ross as a joke as we stood in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. I handed him a nicely roasted chicken on a platter, but he sulkily refused to take it, eyes stern at the infraction, the mouth curved downward in a pout.
“Just put some on a plate and bring it out,” he said in a low but annoyed voice. “It’s stupid to have chicken on Thanksgiving. Really stupid. I can’t believe you didn’t get a turkey.”
“You know the other three don’t eat meat.” He made a face at me, like how would I know? “I wasn’t even sure you’d be back in time,” I continued, getting in my own dig. “I’m not gonna cook up a huge turkey for two people—we’d be eating it for months.” Still holding the platter, I jerked my head in the direction of our guests. “They don’t care. Why are you being so rigid?”
“I’m not being rigid,” Ross countered in his most annoying I’m-rational-and-you’re-hysterical lawyer voice. “I have nothing against roast chicken; you make excellent chicken. Just don’t try to pass it off as a proper Thanksgiving dinner. You need a turkey with stuffing . . . real stuffing . . .”
“Ross, Amy. Come and join us. Don’t stand there arguing. Come and eat,” Afroze called out.
Jean and Dr. Ngom declined wine, so I drank for them. Philippe was gracious, praising everything except the cranberries (they were too tart). The wine went to my head, but I handled it well, I thought, for someone saddled with a brilliant but mean fiancé. I attended to Philippe on my right and Jean on my left with aplomb, listened attentively to Afroze, all the while casting injured, provocative glances at Ross across the table. Our eyes met several times. Emboldened, prodded by the look I found there, I picked up the platter of chicken, holding it unsteadily in one hand as the juices threatened to run onto the tablecloth. “Ross.” I spoke loudly, cutting off all other conversation, all heads turning towards me. “Would you like some chicken?”
Later as I was cutting the pies, Jean serving the coffee in the dining room, Ross came into the kitchen, silently putting his arms around my waist from behind. “Watch it, mister,” I said. “I have a knife.”
“I’ll settle with you later,” he promised in my ear. He released me, successfully stealing a chunk of crust before I shooed him away.
“Get outta here.”
“Just remember,” he added, coming back and pulling me against him again, “public drunks are never as amusing as they think they are.”
Mildly chastised and only marginally more sober, I retired to the living room with our guests after dessert. Ross and Jean had started a “discussion” over the pumpkin pie as to whether it was better to work within the political system or remain outside and thus unsullied by the inevitable corruption therein; Jean at one point opining that HRI was losing its street credibility. (Them’s fighting words!) They got so volatile they were “volunteered” to clean up, basically told to take it out in the kitchen, Jean minutely inspecting each glass and plate as she washed and argued, scratching at invisible specs of food with her fingernail; Ross, towel in hand and irritation flickering over his face, putting them away half-wet and in the wrong place. Jean’s voice wafted in toward us as we tried to ignore the galley debate (“Afroze, did you know that Philippe . . .”), rising higher and higher, the caffeine, sugar kicking in (she had had several cups of coffee and also had split a second piece of pie with me), her stream of dogma increasingly flecked with tiny barbs and insults. Ross refused to give ground, eventually just talking louder and louder. She had parked her car, metaphorically speaking, in front of him and wouldn’t let him pass, so he just walked right over it, stomping on the hood, roof, trunk. I trotted out now and then to make sure they didn’t come to blows.
On leaving us a few days later, Jean said to me as she was gathering up her scant belongings in the small bedroom, impulsively grabbing hold of my hand, “Ross is a good guy.” She gripped my hand in hers for a few minutes, patting it, the two of us sitting silently side by side on the bed in the bright white light, the first sunny day since her arrival. “I’m proud of you,” she finally said. She was making life statements, talking as if she expected us never to see each other again, and it was making me nervous. We drove her to the train station in New Haven. As the train pulled in and people pushed around us, she kissed me goodbye, her face wan and tired-looking above the gauzy, garnet-colored scarf I had bought for her, her earrings fluttering, her eyes semi-circled with wrinkles I hadn’t noticed before. Turning to Ross, she poked him in the chest with her finger, saying in a strangely proprietary tone, “You’re lucky; I hope you realize that.” As the train pulled out, I had an eerie, at-a-loss feeling that the headmistress, not without emotion, had handed me my diploma.
Image: “We are all star stuff.” Source: “The Progress of the Stars: Les Pêcheurs,” from the Bound Volume Illustrating The Poetry And Music Of Georges Fragerolle. Henri Rivière. France: C. Marpon & Flammarion, 1890. Creative Commons (CC0 1.0) Edited by J. Weigley.