That the latter was a necessary quality in any person I might consider marrying was something I likely knew somewhere inside me but couldn’t have put into words that day. I was twenty-two and having an early dinner in a breezy Los Angeles restaurant on Sunset and Vine, with a co-worker I’d kissed two nights before, tipsy on tequila after a postwork Memorial Day party. Even so, I felt the importance of this new information — that he was a good eater, and an eater I could respect — and despite having spent the previous five months working together and hanging out very platonically, hiking trails in Malibu and the Valley, it struck me as the most significant definer of his character that I’d so far been privy to, and I felt more connected to him for it.
Today I have a clearer sense of what attracts me, and sitting with a poor eater, the articulated words impotent and emasculated come to me, cruel as they are. Even as a young girl, I sometimes felt a jolt of meanness toward fussy eaters. Being a good eater was a point of pride in my family, and there were summer nights when I sat alongside my father eating more steamer clams than I cared for — using the ugly black siphons that poked from their shells to dip them first in hot water, to rinse them, and then in a ramekin of melted butter — simply to bask longer in his approval. My sisters, both decent eaters, drew the line at the steamers’ texture and scrunched their faces in disgust; but I was my father’s daughter, and we ate on.
We have always been a warm, boisterous, physical family — hugging and kissing and linking arms and sitting close — but we can also be a quietly judgmental lot, who frown at weakness and prize strength above all else. And there are no more egregious revealers of a weak nature than being fussy at the table, straying from one’s faith, and staying with a man you know isn’t right for you. By which I mean dating; in marriage, it was understood, one was sealed to one’s mistakes.
I’ve heard it said that “love chooses you,” but I was raised to believe it’s a choice each of us makes — the most important choice each of us makes — and that the consequences of not doing so properly can be a life more akin to a long, unhappy death. George Washington, of all people, once put it nicely when he wrote to a friend: “I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one’s life, the foundation of happiness or misery.” As a girl I watched my aunts and neighbors with their husbands, and my older cousins marry, and I saw how the person you chose, like a dye dropped into water, came to affect everything.
My eye was trained to this by my mother, who by her own admission had chosen poorly. She and my father dated for a year, and after enough people asked when they were going to get married, in the car after a date one night my father said, “So I guess we should get married.” And my mother agreed. She mostly blamed her decision on not having anyone to talk it over with. She still tells me, incredulous, “It wasn’t until we were at the church and Grandma was pulling the veil down over my face that she said to me, ‘Are you sure about this?’” By the time they reached their honeymoon, my mother was certain of her mistake.
Determined to protect her three daughters from similar fates, she filled the talk in our household of women (which certainly it was even before my father left, during our teenage years) with tales and dissections of relationships and marriage. It was an agenda further fueled by my older sister, Bridget, who was particularly pretty and so attracted the attention of men quite early (far earlier than my younger sister, Maria, or I would, which I think actually suited us both). At the center of all the talk was usually a woman who just didn’t understand what she was getting into; or who was so in love she simply couldn’t see a situation for what it was. I understood early that men possessed the ability to separate a woman from her senses, and that in order to choose correctly I would have to keep my mind and eyes clear so as not to become a victim of the very thing I sought to commit to.
I stepped carefully through a modest dating career, and then one January afternoon Rich walked into the office of my first magazine job, to interview for the position just above mine. I was the editorial assistant, with a big desk up front for secretarial chores, and I handed him the paperwork, validated his parking ticket, and told him to sit and wait. Back then, the type of man who turned my head was thick and athletic, a bulk of a man in whose enormous hands I felt feminine and light. This person who chose the chair closest to my desk, however, extending and crossing his legs at the ankles, so that twice I had to step over them, was just a head taller than me, broad-shouldered but thin, confident but eager; I imagined myself out of his league. And still, with a severity I couldn’t explain even to myself, catching the strangeness of my actions, I made a point of ignoring him: disliking how casually he’d dressed; aware he wasn’t fidgeting like the others; disregarding the neat curve of his black hair around his small, perfect ears.
The first time I went to his apartment, I noticed a DVD of A Room with a View on his television. It’s a book I love, and a movie that few people have ever agreed to watch with me. I’ve been a fervent reader since I was in single-digit birthdays, disappearing deep inside a book only to look up hours later in a nearly dark room, queasy and discombobulated with the feeling of being so abruptly returned to my life. I can still see my mother turning at the sink with a white dish towel in her hands and a look of surprise on her face as I walked, squinting, into the bright kitchen, my cheeks hot with indignant tears over the unfair treatment of poor Ramona Quimby, age eight. Years later, it was Lucy Honeychurch I particularly related to, and with her I fell in love with George Emerson. A decade after first seeing the movie, I still pined for a man who could kiss me with the urgency that George kissed Lucy in the field of violets; a man who could love me with such urgency.
“Is that yours?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I love that movie," he said. “Have you seen it?”
Rich has a theory that the universe (or as I think of it, God) sets out little signposts for us along the way, to confirm that we’re on the right path. Had I known this theory then, the moment definitely would have qualified.
We dated for two years before, frustrated with my career, I decided to apply to graduate schools. We were happy and I loved him and I was in love with him, but I was still too young, I imagined, to be thinking about marriage, so I applied to the schools I wanted to go to, regardless of where they were, because while I didn’t want to leave him, I was even more adamant about not being the type of woman who made important decisions based on a man. “The intellect is always fooled by the heart,” La Rochefoucauld knew as early as the seventeenth century. But I told myself I was keeping my head clear.
During the months that we waited for the universities’ replies, I thought about how, had the situation been reversed — had he applied for something that meant leaving me— I would have been incredibly hurt. And I knew, too, that had he applied to something far away and asked me to go with him I likely would have refused, entirely out of pride. I would have left someone I loved before I gave anyone the ammunition to say, And then she just gave up everything and followed him. I wouldn’t have done it, and I didn’t ask him to.
Still, when Columbia accepted me, I whispered to Rich during a late-night call, “Did they just put an expiration date on us?” But he surprised me. “I’ll move too,” he said. “I’ll get an apartment near yours and work freelance. I want to be with you.” By then he was the editor in chief of the magazine where we’d met and had turned it into one of the company’s most profitable. His contract kept him there another ten months after I moved, but the week it was up he packed his things and left Los Angeles for New York. Or rather, he left Los Angeles for me.
Four years later I turned in a thesis, and the week of my May graduation Rich pulled a ring from the front pocket of his jeans and made a nervous but earnest speech I hope I always remember. It was six years to the day from our first kiss. We found an apartment, signed a lease for July 1, and finally moved in together.
Moving in together is a thing I suppose we might have done sooner, but I was raised in fire and brimstone churches and still possess enough God fear to want to keep certain carts behind certain horses. As a sixth or seventh grader back in evangelical churches, I used to hope the apocalypse wouldn’t really happen in the year 2000, as my mother said it likely would, so that I’d still have a chance at some God-sanctioned married sex. My understanding of sex at the time was, at best, absolutely vague, but it still struck me as incredibly unfair that I might rise up into heaven before adulthood and be made to miss out on this thing that everyone else seemed to enjoy so enormously. In the end, my carts and horses weren’t always arranged exactly as my mother and God might have liked (I can barely remember a time when they weren’t a team), and even now, our living together before the wedding, engaged or not, raises more eyebrows than I care to consider.
The apartment we moved into is on the western edge of Brooklyn, in an ugly, industrial neighborhood that’s not without its charms. As manufacturing headed overseas, artists moved into the emptied factories lining these streets, and the young and entrepreneurial eventually followed, opening cocktail bars with silver absinthe drippers and mustachioed bartenders, pork-only barbecue restaurants, and the types of intricately detailed boutiques that girls dream up in their bedrooms. Our building was once a knitting factory run by our landlord’s father, and our ground-floor apartment — a vaguely S-shaped open loft with high ceilings and windows only in the bedroom area — is where I suspect the loading dock once stood. Across the street is a still-functioning factory for wooden water towers (the odd, silo-like structures that sit so incongruously atop apartment buildings), and from our bed we can see its tall chute and hear and smell the mulched wood it sends sliding down. To the left, though — compensation — the street widens and the view is a welcome swatch of sky, a churning stretch of the East River, and the startling profile of Manhattan’s East Side: the Union Square clock tower, the changing colored lights of the Empire State Building that click off at midnight sharp, and the racing lines of the FDR Drive, with its marching ants by day and double strands of pearls each night.
The soufflé is all I remember about the dinner portion of that first date, both his ordering it and how ethereal its warm top later was in my mouth. Though I can still feel the shy nervousness with which I entered the restaurant, and see the late-evening sun that glinted off my windshield when Rich walked me to my car (we had driven separately, straight from work). And I can too well still conjure the horrible, wonderful whir that took over my chest, a mixture of anxiousness and longing and a great need to secure something elemental and wholly necessary that ran inside me like a small motor on high, undoing me for weeks until I felt sure that he was mine and I was his and whatever it was we had started with that kiss would last for some good amount of time.
Just how much time I was fuzzy on, but I pictured something solid and reflective of the growing love that I felt — maybe an entire year, or even two. But never did I imagine that the skinny, confident twenty-six-year-old ordering that soufflé for us — the only one of the handful of young guys at our office who had visited my desk and noticed my tattered copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and had already read it himself — was the man I was going to marry. Or that, smiling at me across the starched white tablecloth, with the kitchen door and a sloping potted palm over his left shoulder, was the person I’d hope to be sharing my meals with always.
