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“On and off,” his mother said, correcting her error. “Fifteen years on and off.”
“Okay, whatever. It's really not worth arguing about.”
“Anyway, for what it's worth, I still think September is a good month.”
“I'll keep that in mind.”
A brief silence ensued. When his mother spoke, her voice had dwindled into a worried, confidential whisper. “She's not … in trouble, is she?”
“In trouble?” Dave teased. “You mean with the law?”
“Ha ha,” she replied.
“Not that I know of.”
“Good.” Another phone rang at her end of the line. “I have to grab that, honey. Bye.”
“Okay,” he told the hum that had replaced his mother. “Talk to you later.”
Julie Called before he'd swallowed his second sip of coffee.
“Hey, sleepyhead.”
“Oh, hi.”
“What's wrong?” she asked quickly. He caught the barely perceptible note of fear in her voice.
“Nothing.”
“You don't sound too good.”
“I'm fine.”
“Are you sure?”
He saw the opening, but couldn't bring himself to take it. The kind of talk they needed to have, you couldn't do over the phone, he realized, especially during business hours.
“I didn't get to tell you last night. Phil Hart died at the showcase. He collapsed right onstage.”
“Phil Hart?”
“You know,” Dave told her. “Phil Hart and His Heartstring Orchestra. The guy with the artificial hips?”
“He collapsed onstage?”
“Right in the middle of'Like a Virgin.’ I'm not sure if it was a stroke or coronary or what.”
“God, Dave. That must have been awful. Why didn't you tell me?
“I don't know. I guess I didn't want to spoil the mood.”
“That was sweet of you.” She sounded vaguely perplexed.
Dave didn't answer. He just sat there, staring at the nutritional information on the side panel of a box of Cheerios, marveling at his own cowardice.
“I love you,” she said.
“Yeah.” He massaged an eyelid with two fingers. “Same here.”
“Oh, by the way,” she said. “You're invited for supper tonight. My parents want to celebrate.”
He forced himself not to groan. “What time?”
“Seven?”
“Okay.”
“There's so much planning to do,” she said happily. “I'm overwhelmed just thinking about it.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“By the way,” she added, “what do you think of September?”
Dave had two courier runs that afternoon—a quick in-and-out to Wall Street, followed by a trip to Morristown to drop off some X rays at a doctor's office. He liked driving for a living, especially since it meant he got paid for time spent listening to tunes on his car stereo. There was no better way to experience music, cranking the volume as high as it could go in an enclosed space, singing at the top of his lungs as he zigzagged like a stuntman through slow-moving traffic on the Pulaski Skyway. He could never understand how people managed to survive entire days cooped up in an office, with nothing to listen to but ringing phones and hushed voices. Even worse, a few of the places he visited had piped-in Muzak, the sound track of living death. Just thinking about it gave him the willies.
Another cool thing about his job was that it brought him into the city two or three times a week. Manhattan was always a jolt of crazy energy, a reminder that life wasn't meant to be safe or easy, the way it was in the suburbs. Dave even appreciated the stuff that gave most drivers headaches—the insane cabbies and squeegee men, the pedestrians who swarmed around his car at red lights like ants around a piece of candy, the whistle-tooting bike messengers and Rollerbladers who zipped past his windshield in suicidal blurs. Just making it in and out of this mess in one piece qualified as a triumph, an achievement he could carry around for the rest of the day.
Sometimes he wondered if things would have turned out differently if he'd moved into the city after dropping out of college instead of drifting back to his parents’ house and the routine of familiar places and faces that had consumed his life ever since. Maybe it would have sharpened him somehow, having to live in a dingy, roach-infested shoe-box apartment, eating canned soup and SpaghettiOs, following in the footsteps of Dylan and Lou Reed and Talking Heads and the zillions of wannabes who'd journeyed to the city to test themselves against the myth Sinatra sang about. It wasn't something he brooded about, just a possibility he turned over in his mind every now and then when he found himself trying to answer the thorny question of how it was he'd ended up a Wishbone instead of a star.
In the car, he was able to consider his predicament more clearly, without the edge of panic that had clouded his morning thoughts. The first thing he realized was that it wasn't the idea of marrying Julie that frightened him; it was the idea of being married, of joining this big corny club of middle-aged men that included his father, Julie's father, his uncles, and every scoutmaster, Little League coach, and volunteer fireman he'd ever known. There were some exceptions—Bruce Springsteen and Buzzy came to mind— but in general, marriage seemed to require that a man check his valuables at the door: his dreams, his freedom, all the wildness that had defined the secret part of his life, even if, like Dave, he wasn't all that wild in reality.
It was easier if you were a woman. Women were supposed to want to get married, to go through life with a husband and children. A man's job, as far as Dave could see, was simply to resist for as long as possible before surrendering to the inevitable. You didn't have to play guitar in a wedding band to know that there was something at least slightly pathetic about a bridegroom.
Beyond his personal fears, though, he identified a deeper, more philosophical question: Was marriage something you chose, or was it something that happened whether you wanted it to or not, one of those mysterious, transforming events on the order of birth and death? The no-brain answer, of course, was that you chose. You were an adult in a free country; there were no arranged marriages in America. You didn't have to do anything you didn't want to.
He accepted all that, but on another level, it was hard to say that he and Julie had actually chosen each other in some rational, adult way. Fifteen years ago—half their lifetime—she had walked up to him in the hallway of Warren G. Harding Regional High School and told him that Exit 36 had put on a great show at the spring dance and predicted that they would someday be famous. A week later he took her to see Midnight Express. Two months after that they split a six-pack purchased by her older sister's boyfriend and had sex for the first time. It just happened, in some urgent hormonal haze that had little to do with concepts like choice or intention, and they hadn't been free of each other since. And now, apparently, unless he thought of something fast, they were going to get themselves married.
Dave's father Sat at the table in his Mr. Speedy baseball cap, reading the Daily News with the almost religious thoroughness he devoted to every edition. It seemed to Dave that he pored over every word of it—the advertisements, the classifieds, the bridge column, all twelve horoscopes. Reading the newspaper filled most of Al Raymond's spare time; it was his version of a hobby.
“Hey,” he said, looking up with a smile that was surprised and satisfied at the same time. “Congratulations. Your mother told me the good news.”
“Word travels fast.”
“You had her worried there for a while, Dave. She didn't think Julie would stick around long enough for you to make up your mind.”
“It wasn't a matter of making up my mind. I just didn't feel ready.”
“No one feels ready. It's the same with having kids. You just jump in and start treading water. If everybody waited until they were ready, we wouldn't need express lines at the supermarket.”
Since his retirement, Al had emerged as something of an armchair philosopher, full of cryptic insights into the workings of the world. It was a development that surprised the whole family. Dave still came home half expecting to find the old Al lurking behind his paper, the grumpy exhausted chief of maintenance at the county courthouse, the human jukebox of grievances.
“So what do you think about marriage?” Dave asked, sorting through the junk mail on top of the microwave.
“About what?”
“Marriage.”
“Julie's great,” his father replied. “I hope you'll be happy together.”
“I didn't ask about Julie. I asked what you thought about marriage.”
“What? The institution in general?”
“Yeah. I mean, you've been married for thirty-six years. I figure you might have formed an opinion by now.”
His father studied him for a few seconds, apparently trying to decide if he was serious.
“Come on,” he said, chuckling uncomfortably. “Quit pulling my leg.”
Until that evening, Dave had never given serious consideration to the matter of inlaws. He'd known Jack and Dolores Müller for a long time—almost as long as he'd known their daughter—and paid them the wary respect due the parents of the girl you're sleeping with, but it hadn't occurred to him, except in the vaguest, most fleeting way, to think of them as relatives, people whose lives might one day be intimately and inextricably caught up with his own. Inlaws were people you were required to visit on holidays, people whose genes your children would inherit, people who might—it happened all the time, he realized with dismay—end up, for one reason or another, living in your house.
Mrs. Muller answered the door in a ruffled apron, the bib of which was emblazoned with the image of an eggplant. Despite her manufactured smile, the air between them was instantly thick with embarrassment; Dave had to resist an impulse to place his hands over his crotch. Stepping through the awkwardness into the house, he greeted his future mother-in-law with a clever approximation of a hug.
“Congratulations,” she said, rallying a little. “We're so pleased.”
“Thanks. It's kind of amazing, isn't it?”
“I'll say,” Mrs. Müller agreed, her voice suddenly full of conviction.
Julie was in the kitchen, tenderly probing a casserole with a very large fork. She was wearing gingham oven mitts and a gingham apron over a black floral print dress that was one of Dave's favorites (she occasionally “forgot” to wear underwear with it, a lapse that thrilled him beyond words). Still clutching the fork, she rushed across the room to embrace him. Her skin was clammy; she smelled of meat and Obsession.
“You're gonna love this,” she said. “We made all your favorites.
Dave had never seen her in an apron before, and the effect was disconcerting, especially with her mother standing so close by, also in an apron. The two of them shared a facial resemblance so strong that you could almost imagine them not as mother and daughter, but as the same person at two different stages of life.
Dave had heard the joke about taking a long hard look at your prospective mother-in-law before deciding to get married, but he'd never given it a second thought. It was one of those pearls of marital wisdom a certain type of middle-aged guy like to dispense, something Henny Youngman probably said on Johnny Carson back in 1963.
But now he looked at Julie and Dolores and wondered. Was it possible that Mrs. Muller had once possessed a body as curvy and stirring as Julie's? If so, when had it changed? Was it a gradual transformation, or did it happen overnight? He made a mental note to ask Julie to show him the family photo albums. It was never too early to start bracing for the future.
“So,” he said, gazing around the kitchen with feigned interest, “anything I can do?”
“I don't think so,” said Julie.
“Why don't you go downstairs,” Mrs. Müller suggested, in a tone that made it clear he had no choice in the matter. “Jack wants to have a drink with you.”
Dave shot a quick, pleading glance at Julie, but she refused to save him. Shrugging an insincere apology, she shooed him out of the kitchen with a puffy, checkered hand.
Downstairs, Mr. Muller was waiting on the couch in a tweed jacket and striped tie. He had a glass of scotch in one hand and a thoughtful expression on his face. Except for the metronomic tapping of his right loafer on the carpeted floor, he seemed utterly calm, as though he would've been pleased to sit for hours dressed up like that in a dim and quiet basement.
“Make yourself a drink,” he said, gesturing toward the bar in the corner, on top of which rested an array of bottles, a bowl of lime sections, and an ice bucket that turned out to be empty when Dave lifted the lid.
Grateful for the diversion, he poured himself a stiff vodka tonic. Given that he and Mr. Müller usually made it a point to steer clear of each other, he was somewhat alarmed by the formality of the situation. A roster of unpleasant questions unfurled itself in his mind. What kind of life could he offer Julie? What was the state of his finances? Could he foresee a day when he might be able to afford a house or children? Dave knew all the questions; they were the same ones he'd posed to himself when he'd needed to talk himself out of marriage in the past. Nonetheless, it was galling to have to justify his life to Mr. Müller. He dropped a chunk of lime into his drink and vowed not to apologize for the choices he'd made.
For some reason, the couch was the only piece of furniture in the rec room, so he had no alternative but to sit down a cushion's distance away from Mr. Müller, who was examining Dave's ratty jeans and dirty Converse All Stars with an expression of careful indifference. Dave wished that Julie had warned him that her family was dressing up; he might've at least shaved and given a little more thought to his wardrobe.
“Cheers,” he said, raising his glass in a halfhearted toast.
Mr. Müller returned the gesture without enthusiasm, then pointedly cleared his throat. “I think we need to talk.”
“Okay.”
Mr. Müller swirled the scotch around in his glass. He looked vaguely pained, as though he were trying hard to remember a name. “You've been hanging around Julie for a long time,” he observed, “but I don't feel like I know you. I haven't gotten a handle on … How should I say this? Your angle on the world.”
“Obtuse,” Dave replied, his nerves getting the worst of him.
Mr. Müller cupped one hand around his ear like Ronald Reagan. “Excuse me?”
“Obtuse,” Dave repeated, enunciating more clearly. “I was trying to make a joke. It's a kind of angle. More than ninety degrees?” He tried to illustrate the concept with his hands, but ran into some unexpected difficulty.
“I see,” Mr. Müller replied, attempting to look amused. “Obtuse, acute.”
“Right,” said Dave.
“Geometry,” Mr. Müller said approvingly, as though the subtleties of Dave's remark had finally fallen into place.
“Exactly.”
Mr. Muller polished off his drink and set the glass down on the coffee table with a decisive smack.
“Do you like to fish?”
“Excuse me?” said Dave.
Mr. Müller reformulated the question.
“Fishing,” he said. “Do you like it?”
“Not really. I went a couple of times as a kid, but then I got the hook caught on my eyelid one time, and I pretty much lost interest after that.”
“That'll do it,” Mr. Müller agreed.
“What about you?” Dave ventured after a moment or two of silence. “Do you?”
Mr. Müller gave the matter some thought. For his age, he was a good-looking man, tall and lean, with a boyish shock of gray hair falling over his forehead. He looked senatorial, Dave thought, although his brief entry into the political arena had been a disaster. After losing three close races for a seat on the Darwin school board, he'd bowed to the wishes of the Republican Party and made way for another candidate.
“Never did much for me,” he admitted. “It's bad enough watching them die, but then you have to clean them. Grabbing a handful of slimy guts just isn't my idea of R & R.” He retrieved his glass from the table. “Mind if I have another?”
“Be my guest,” Dave told him.
