Blue Plate Special (35 page)

Despite my knuckleheaded behavior, the ceremony was beautiful and moving. Susan seemed to float down the aisle on our mother’s arm, a crown of flowers in her hair, heartstoppingly gorgeous in a velvety, skintight ivory dress that hugged her swelling belly. Daniel and I stood with Alan and his parents at the altar, our backs to a burbling stream. Daniel and I read the biblical vows, taking turns asking them if they promised to love, cherish, honor, and obey each other. I looked Alan fiercely in the eye as if to say, “This is my sister, dammit. You’d better love her, or I’ll kill you.” He looked back at me with steady tenderness and responded in a voice that held no doubt. I was so choked up I could hardly get the words out.

The bride’s and groom’s siblings all gave toasts. When it was Jon’s turn, he stood up and raised his glass and looked
them each in the eye. “Watch out,” he said with a smile. “You’re really in for it now. Marriage is incredibly hard. And, Alan, good luck being married to a Christensen.”

Everyone laughed except Susan and Alan, who both looked at Jon with solemn, dazed relief. Susan later told me that they had loved his toast the most. They hadn’t realized he was joking. They were grateful that amid all the congratulations, romantic wishes, and jokes, here was someone willing to tell the truth.

T
he truth about our marriage was that, despite the undeniable fact that we had a lot of fun together, gave each other mutual support and comfort, and were close friends and loved each other deeply, we could not stop fighting. Through the early years of our marriage, we fought and fought and fought; neither of us was capable of giving in or folding. We fought about small things and big ones: fingernail clippings or a clogged sink drain, his intensely stressful road rage or my bursts of sharp meanness. After these fights, we sometimes didn’t speak to each other for a week. We were too proud to show any weakness to each other and too stubborn to admit we were scared.

At the beginning, before we got married, when our dual fiery natures were still a source of friction and sexual energy and excitement in the relationship, we used to joke about what hotheads we both were. Now, in the settled routine of a marriage, things were different. It didn’t help that, in our thirties, we were both fairly set in our ways. When Jon complained about something I did, I would say, “But I’ve always been like this.” When I attacked him for something that was driving me crazy, he’d lash back with, “This is how I am.” I hated myself as a wife: I’d become nagging, demanding, and critical. I was as hard on Jon as I was on myself.

My anger at Jon often took the form of tipsy late-night half rants during which I listed all the things I wished he’d do that
he wasn’t doing. He vented his own rage on other things: errant power tools, slow drivers, long lines, people who betrayed him or took him for granted. But his anger, whenever it exploded, flat-out terrified me. When he threw an electric drill against a wall in the next room or went ballistic when the car ahead of us went too slowly and made him miss a light, the traumatic memory of my father’s violent outbursts flared up instantly in my lizard brain. I started hyperventilating with panic; all I could do was hunch over and close my eyes.

Jon tried to assure me that he was not my father, that he would never hurt or assault anyone, especially not me. I tried not to take his rages personally, but just as he couldn’t control his temper, I couldn’t control my reaction to it. Consequently, I spent much of our marriage trying to fend off his anger at anything but me while, ironically, frequently feeling enraged at him. It was a harmful and unhealthy dynamic, a toxic emotional Möbius strip that was both unsustainable and chronic, and neither one of us had any control over it.

I often woke up in the middle of the night with Jon asleep next to me. I lay there, breathing the exhaust fumes from the idling trucks outside, the woodsmoke from a neighbor’s chimney, thinking to myself “What the hell have I done?” Whenever I walked by my old, high-ceilinged, beautiful apartment in Greenpoint, I mourned the autonomous, contented life I’d had there.

J
on worked late in his studio every night; he had rented and renovated a raw space in Bushwick where he now painted, practiced his horn, and developed his photographs. On most nights, we ate together when he got home, at nine or ten or sometimes even eleven. But once in a while, I called to tell him not to hurry. He never complained: this meant he could stay as late as he wanted.

I was happy, too, because I preferred to eat earlier, and I loved going out by myself to restaurants. On those nights, I headed out early, at seven or so. Back in the late nineties, new restaurants were opening here and there, but the old tried-and-true ones still thrived, hadn’t been driven out yet by exploding rents.

My favorite place to go for “bachelorette nights,” as I called them, was a place called the L Café, on Bedford just off North Seventh, near the L stop, owned and run by three people Jon had gone to Bennington with; it was definitely “new Williamsburg,” and it was funky and quietly glamorous, but it wasn’t achingly hip—that was a few years away, the relentless self-consciousness that infected the neighborhood.

The L was in a narrow, long storefront. There was a garden out back with wrought-iron tables and wooden booths. The interior had the dark wood wainscoting, tin ceiling, and linoleum floors of classic North Brooklyn decor.

I walked in and was instantly enveloped in moody indie music and a warm breeze from the kitchen. Strings of tiny white lights twinkled behind the bar. I always sat at a small table in the back and ordered a plateful of something homey like yellow rice and red beans and roast chicken, or lamb stew with chickpeas and root vegetables. While I ate and drank wine, literally wriggling my toes with the deep happiness of autonomous solitude, I would write by hand—in those days, I still kept a journal I wrote in almost daily, like finger exercises for a musician. And I annotated the printouts of my current novel in progress with a pen.

I always had a second glass of wine but never a third. I stayed there at that table for two or even three hours in a self-contained bubble of words and food and wine. People came and went and talked at the tables all around me; I didn’t look at anyone. I eavesdropped a little but only in a desultory because-it-was-there sort of way, without any real purpose. If someone
I knew came in and greeted me, I said hello back with the borderline-rude brusqueness of a night watchman, guarding the factory. The whole point of these nights out was to be alone in public with a plate of food and some wine and my writing.

These nights afforded me immense happiness, more, I think, than any dinner party or one-on-one dinner with Jon or a friend, in those days. I have always felt loneliest in the presence of other people—people I can’t connect with, people I feel unseen by, people who make me feel insincere or uncomfortable. For me, loneliness comes from a sense of missing something. I never miss anything when I’m alone.

D
uring the year following Susan and Alan’s wedding, I turned thirty-seven. I was more than ready to have kids by this time.
In the Drink
had just been published. Jon and I had been married for three years. I wanted to have two of them, so time was running out fast.

When I announced this to Jon, expecting him to agree, expecting us to unite in shared excitement over this next phase of our life together, he told me that actually he didn’t want them, not yet, and maybe not ever. He was still enjoying our fun freewheeling life too much and didn’t want to give it up.

This hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. Here was another, new source of painful contention between us, the worst we’d ever been through. It turned out that we wanted radically different things. I wanted a conventional life, a real house, which I’d never had as a kid, and Jon was still rebelling against his own conventional upbringing. He’d married me in part because he loved my wild side, and I’d married him in part because I loved his stable, conventional side. He saw me as exciting and a little crazy, and I saw him as deeply trustworthy and solid. Unfortunately, these were the qualities in ourselves we most wanted to leave behind. I wanted to live in a clean,
renovated Victorian house full of books, not a rough-hewn, unfinished industrial loft. I wanted to raise bright, good kids, to write bright, good novels in a quiet study, to cook wholesome meals and listen to Bach. He wanted to play loud amplified music, sleep late, drink tequila, and travel. It seemed to me that we didn’t want to be the people we’d married each other for.

At first, I refused to believe this. For the next year or more, I begged Jon to have a baby with me, pleaded with him, often crying, to trust me, that he’d never regret it, that this was the most important and wonderful thing we could do. But he remained firm. We were having so much fun. Why wreck it? Why clutter up our loft with bottles and diapers and cribs? He was right, in a way—we were having a golden time of it in those days, going to parties and concerts, traveling, exploring far-flung outer-borough restaurants. None of the closest friends we shared as a couple had kids. It was premature in that sense, and I could see his point, but I was in my late thirties, and I felt like now was the time: now or never. I had always thought I would have kids. I had always assumed my husband would acquiesce when I was ready, or even share my excitement. This deep, sudden schism between Jon and me was terrifying.

Meanwhile, my best friend, Cathi, and my sister Susan were both pregnant. I imagined how great it would be if we all had kids around the same age. My longing for a baby, dormant for my whole life until now, had become the most powerful, overriding urge I’d ever felt. I could feel a solid, warm, nestling little body in my arms sometimes, a hallucinatory desire so strong it made me dizzy.

As time went on and Jon refused to give in, I finally realized that I had to accept this or leave him. But I didn’t want to leave; how could I admit failure after only a few years of marriage? And I loved him, in spite of our differences. So I accepted his decision sadly, but my heart was broken. As our
life went on, as I felt increasingly stuck, stymied, powerfully disappointed, my ability to put a good face on things, which I’d inherited from my grandmother and mother, began to be my most useful attribute. As far as everyone knew, I was perfectly happy, and I made myself believe it, too.

After
In the Drink
was published, I finished my second novel,
Jeremy Thrane
, a love song to New York City narrated by a gay man in his thirties, with food as its leitmotif, its bass line. In it, I wrote frankly and without fictionalization about my father. It was the first and only time I had done so. This was my most autobiographical novel, with me disguised as a gay man.

In the weeks after it was published,
Jeremy Thrane
disappeared. September 11 devastated us and our whole circle of friends. In the months following the fall of the World Trade Center, where I had worked during the two years of Jon’s and my happy courtship, I underwent a kind of internal, shell-shocked, nerve-racked breakdown, and I was not, by a long shot, the only New Yorker in this condition.

I found that I couldn’t write in our loft anymore, so I rented a room in a falling-down nineteenth-century house in Greenpoint, down by the river, nicknamed the Shady Rest and the Heartbreak Hotel. It was a sort of SRO for sad-sack men who lived on public assistance and sat all day in their shirtsleeves, smoking and waiting for their Meals on Wheels to arrive. My landlady, Nancy, was Italian, born and raised in Bensonhurst. Her dad had been a mobster, and so had her dead husband. She was frank, smart, a born raconteur with a round, impish face and a hoarse smoker’s chuckle that always made me laugh.

Nancy lived in the cozy, renovated basement apartment and rented the two or three empty, uninhabited upstairs rooms, cheap, to writers and artists—first to my old Iowa friend Sally, who had recommended me to Nancy when I was looking for a studio, and then, on my recommendation, to Jon’s photographer friend Hal, who almost got kicked out for having a nude model in his studio who hung out the front window, smoking. He frantically explained to Nancy that there was nothing pornographic going on—this was art. She grudgingly, good-heartedly went against her own better judgment and accepted this explanation and let him stay. Soon she was his greatest fan.

I paid two hundred dollars a month for the large room on the top floor at the back of the house. My two windows faced north and looked out over flat tar paper roofs, old brick warehouses, backyards, and treetops all the way to the green, shining Citicorp tower in Queens. The room had a linoleum floor, a boarded-up fireplace, and a falling-down plaster ceiling; the roof leaked, there was no heat, and I shared the place with a noticeable but not intolerable population of mice. I warmed the room up with plants, Jon’s paintings, and a large old rose-colored flower-patterned wool rug. I brought a small coffee-maker and a radio. In the cold months, I worked in my hat, scarf, and coat.