We repacked our stuff right there in the arrivals hall in JFK, making ersatz weekend travel cases out of duty-free bags, wrapping the whiskey and the vodka in sweaters. Husband #1 did not have enough sweaters. His coat was not heavy enough. He did not know this yet, we had yet to set foot outside into los big, indifferent, freezing-effing-cold Estados Unidos. Then we left our bags—just left them—in the pay-by-day luggage-storage facility (which no longer exists, another thing the terrorists have taken from us), paying a week’s storage with some of the dollars, not that many, that our Euros had bought us at the Amex change window.
In a state of extreme, don’t-remember-when-we-last-slept jet-lag, we took some combination of buses and trains, I don’t remember the details, to get to the picturesque little New England town where a pair of old college friends of mine were living—married, a couple, with one sweet little girl, just a year old. Like I said last week, we called them from the pay phones (this was the 90s, there were plenty of pay phones) in the airport, Husband #1 still clutching the envelope containing his immigration papers to his chest like a lottery check. With some quarters we bummed from some people (not like we’d actually thought to come prepared with anything as practical as quarters).
Our luck was epic: my friends were home (what would we have done if they hadn’t been? I have no idea). My girlfriend answered the phone.
I’d always been closer to her. In our freshman year, her husband had actually semi-stalked me, having spotted me in a bright green swimsuit—I have red hair, so that was like plugging in a string of Christmas lights on a tall, skinny tree, except in reverse—at some sort of awkward freshman mixer that involved an indoor swimming pool in steamy late August. He claimed I talked to him, and maybe I did, I truly do not remember, but I do remember my chagrin at the spectacle of him, slowing his lanky stride as he cruised our hall, a bouquet of celery in his hand (someone had told him I was vegetarian). I hid behind a couch in the lounge while my roommate told him I was at the library and accepted the bouquet of celery on my behalf.
He was, as we giggled a few hours later over Bloody Marys we’d made just so we could chop the celery up and stir our big-gulp glasses of mostly vodka with the pale green stalks (hardy-har, yes, we giggled especially maniacally at that–we were eighteen, what do you expect?) that had been offered to me as a token of lust, christened “Celery Man.” (Where did we get the vodka, college freshmen that we were? No idea, but I don’t think it was very hard to obtain.)
Soon thereafter, Celery Man had a punk girlfriend (not my friend who answered the telephone). They were a strange sight—him so tall and thin and preppy, her shorter and stouter and busty and dressed in black. He was very public about the fact that he had sex with her, and maybe that was supposed to bother me, but in fact it made me feel relieved. He also never hid the fact that he was still into me, which bothered the punk girlfriend, however punk she may have been, and she never liked me much.
Not surprisingly, we sort of fell out of each other’s orbits. Then lost touch.
So it was strange when, toward the end of my sophomore year, in the incarnation of maybe the third or fourth personality type I tried on during my college years (as you do, along with the accompanying look and clothes and makeup and friends and food and music), he turned up as a suitor to a new friend of mine.
Someone who was teaching me about opera and French cheese and medieval studies and how to be sophisticated. And there he was, at some language house dinner or other (I was in the Spanish house, my new friend across the court in the French one), as her suitor. But still pretty obviously crushing on me.
To their wedding, I’d worn black. Not a statement of any sort, directed at any one. I always wore black in those days. Actually I kind of still do.
And I was in black–which was remarked upon–when Celery Man picked us up in a shiny new SUV at the picturesque little train station. Dusted with snow (the heavy white stuff would fall overnight), timelessly American. It was already dark, but it was January so it might not have been very late.
Introductions. I translated (remember that Husband #1 spoke virtually no English at this stage, so I spent the next ten days or so on pretty much constant call as simultaneous translator). It felt cozy and safe in the SUV. It was nice.
When we walked into the front door of their snug, pitch-roofed, clapboard house—everything about it was classic New England, from the original, 19th-century floorboards to the small, thick-paned windows, to the beamed kitchen ceiling and the slate blues and pewters and grays—we landed in what felt like a photoshoot for a lifestyle magazine.
The little girl newly put to sleep—she was good, she was quiet, she was a sleeper. The house fragrant of potpourri, something citrusy and cinnamony and piney and wintry. A fire in the period-perfect fireplace, sheets waiting on the sofa visible through the doorway, where we would sleep. Salad, French bread, fondue. Cloth napkins, wine glasses of the size and shape appropriate to the excellent Bordeaux we’d be drinking.
My girlfriend and Celery Man–who came from genteel, old money and privilege, so all this stuff was as every-day and unremarkable to him as tap water–prided themselves on pulling this sort of spread together, even when there was no company. We spent most of the dinner hearing about their good life—a hiatus in grad school for my friend to start the family they’d got growing, a well-paid job in tech, which was a new Thing then, for Celery Man.
Who did still look at me. My girlfriend, I think, just took it in stride. The looking bothered Husband #1, though. The sofa-sex later was vigorous. I’m pretty sure it shook the colonial foundations of the house. So of course it got heard, all the way upstairs, which maybe was Husband #1’s intention.
But before the sofa-sex, we made it through three bottles of wine, and then assorted after-dinner drinks, of which my friends possessed an exotic collection of offerings. Calvados was a favorite. Went down well with the duty-free chocolate Husband #1 and I contributed. Or rather, I did — buying it had been my idea.
Stories of our wedding in Gibraltar were a huge hit—we couldn’t just pull phones out of our pockets and show pictures because in the early 90s phones still lived permanently attached to walls, I don’t even think we had cordless yet. So we had to paint the picture with words, mine in my native English and Husband #1’s which I translated (mine were better, let here be no doubt).
The next morning greeted us with about two feet of New England snow, omelettes prepared individually by Celery Man, amazing coffee from somewhere exotic, fresh ground in an era when electric coffee grinders were still considered miraculous, and—miraculously—no hangover. We were younger then.
Celery Man had already been to the little corner store—I think it must have been a Saturday, if he was home—and procured a selection of Manhattan-produced newspapers, including the Village Voice, so we might comfortably begin compiling a list of possible apartments. We could use the phone, make all the calls we needed to, don’t worry about it, what are friends for.
Probably doesn’t need spelling out that I thanked my friends over and over—they even supplied a coat to Husband #1, which he took with him to the city and never returned, along with a gently-used sweater or two—and cleared tables after meals and chopped vegetables for salad and loaded and unloaded dishwashers and folded laundry. Anything to lend a hand to my girlfriend and express my gratitude and make us less of a burden (which we were told over and over we were not, but we clearly were). And probably doesn’t need spelling out that Husband #1 treated all these kindnesses as something the world, and therefore my friends, just… owed him. Artistic genius that he was. The meals, the bed, the winter clothes; the daily rides to and from the train station, our journeys together into the city to find somewhere to live, back to New England on the train at night, into this other world.
A world that made me feel oddly close to my mother, who had died not long before. Once she and my father took a fall vacation to see foliage, driving all the way up into Maine, and she never tired of talking about the beautiful houses and hills and landscape, I think she’d have liked to live there.
In my friends’ house, their home, there was a feeling of family. Something from which I had fled—to higher education, to Europe, to languages, to books—but which a hidden place deep inside me still craved. My girlfriend would have been happy to hear me say that, because she so desperately wanted a warm, normal, happy family.
We listened to so much opera that week, she and I. Like when we’d driven all over, in college, in her huge boat of a Buick, La Traviata in the tape deck, windows down, volume cranked. My friend knew about opera because her father had taught her. Opera and airplanes, his escapes. He shared them with his favorite daughter as he fought to care for a wife afflicted with seasonal affective disorder before that disorder had a name. Before it was understood. Back when it was till treated with shock therapy. My friend’s childhood and youth had been anything but safe and normal. She wanted so badly to create that safety, that normalcy, for someone. Give what she’d never had.
And she did, and she has, despite the fact that Celery Man—who was not born in los Estados Unidos, and who was lazy about getting his papers in order and keeping them that way—had an addiction to underage porn that took him to ever-more dangerous places as technology (his job, remember?) became ever more advanced. Despite the fact that said addiction would, years later, get him barred from los Estados Unidos for years (the disorderly papers helped with that) and upend her life and her finances and her normalcy. She kept it all together, though, and even though I don’t speak to her very often any more, I love her and am proud of her for her monumental grit and determination and strength. She has happiness again now and she deserves every iota of it.
I guess we should all have maybe seen it coming, that tendency of Celery Man’s, because he was showing signs as early as sophomore year. We just thought he was kidding.
But in those early days they were both trying so hard to make something together, and they were succeeding. I know they had good times together, because I witnessed some of them. Those won’t ever go anywhere, and I hope she still thinks it’s okay to remember them fondly.
It was that making something together, though, that made Husband #1 as restless as a caged lion in that picture-perfect New England bungalow. He’d get up after meals without even a perfunctory offer to help clean up, and go walking up and down the (beautiful) lane, brusquely brushing off offers of company from Celery Man (yours truly translating all the while). He was an artist, he’d come for the city. He hadn’t come for suburbs or New England or cozy fondue or people who owned SUVs (even though that SUV hauled his ass to and from the train station every morning, and its driver bought him coffee).
These morose attacks—I’d never seen them before, we were learning about one another at a vertiginous pace, or rather I was learning about him; I don’t think he thought he needed to learn about me—would become a Thing. A problem, in our very young marriage. Which neither of us, each for her or his own reasons, ever treated like a real marriage.
I remember a lot of things from that strange, beautiful, out-of-time, uncomfortable, wonderful week we spent with my friends in New England, but the image that sticks the hardest, that comes back to push all the others aside, is this one:
The two of us, waiting, alone—maybe it was a strange time of day to be taking a train—at the tiny, picturesque station. Husband #1 bundled in the sweater and jacket and scarf ‘loaned’ to him by my friend (because, whatever else Celery Man was, had been, would become, he was, at that time, still my friend, and a very good one), standing at a greater distance than strictly necessary from me. There is snow, neatly shoveled–this is New England, after all. And the encroaching woods—the station, the little town even, carved out of a wilderness once tromped through by Pilgrims and Native Americans and who knows, maybe even Paul Revere—are layers of gray-brown branches glazed just so with ice, so they glitter. The whiteness of the landscape makes our two figures stand out. Together, but each alone. Much more alone than together.
It might have been good if we could have seen ourselves then, from above. Really seen. But, of course, we didn’t. Who does?
Catch you next week, Bad, Bad Love friends. It’ll be apartment-shopping time!
Yay. Oh, yay.
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