Love at the Speed of Email (24 page)

He grinned despite his abashment, and I laughed.

“I need some time,” I said, stumbling over my explanation,
not even quite sure what I was trying to say. “I want to give this decision
some room to breathe. I need some time to process and focus on us rather than
having all my energy go to dealing with the deluge of questions that
will
come when we tell people, you
know.”

The answer, I told Mike that
night,
was both yes and wait. I didn’t know whether that meant waiting for two days,
two weeks, or two years. But one thing I did know in the midst of this
out-of-body-experience was that I didn’t want to start on a long list of
“people to tell” and risk repeated conversations along the lines of:

Lisa: Mike and I are engaged.

Good friend No. 23 (looking totally stunned): Oh my
word
! Isn’t that a bit fast?

Lisa: Uh, yeah, I’m a bit thrown by it myself. I didn’t
think we’d be addressing this question
quite
yet.

Good friend No. 23 (delicately): Are you sure you know what
you doing?

Lisa (edging toward hysteria): I think so. I really think I
do. All my instincts say yes. But then I came home this afternoon and he was
cleaning my kitchen and playing
Shakira
and I
realized that I didn’t know he likes
Shakira
, and I
don’t know what music is on his iPod, and is it safe to agree to marry someone
when you don’t know what music is on their iPod? Is it?? Huh??? HUH????”

Good friend No. 23: Um …

So at 2 a.m. after a rather exhausting conversation – the
kind of conversation that anyone would want to have on the night she gets
engaged, really – I said yes to something else that Mike offered me that night
and did something I’d never done before.

I took Valium.

* * *

The next morning I dropped Mike off at my place after church
on Sunday and went out for coffee with my parents.

“Take your time,” Dad said anxiously. “Don’t worry about how
Mike’s doing. He’s had time to think this through. You just have to focus on
whether or not this is what
you
want.
Take as much time as you need.”

“Oh,” Mum said with a casual wave of one hand, “so he
surprised you. So it’s not exactly unfolding the way you thought it would. So
you hit an unanticipated speed bump. You’ll work it out. I think he’s
terrific.” She grinned. “You know, there will be lots of good stories if you
marry him.”

“
Merrilyn
!
Please
!” my father said, agonized,
both hands going to his forehead. “You do
not
marry someone because they’ll give you
stories
.”

“Oh I don’t know,” Mum said. “There are worse reasons.”

“Don’t worry,” I said quickly, worried that Dad was courting
a heart attack. “I’ll take the time I need.”

That turned out not to be two years, two
months, or even two weeks.
By Tuesday night I’d watched Mike hang on to
a cheerful self-possession during three days of limbo and gone over and over it
in my mind.

I wasn’t absolutely sure that it was the right decision,
frankly, but I also knew that I’m never one hundred percent sure about anything
in life. It’s just not in my nature. So just how sure did I need to be to make
a commitment of this magnitude? Was it enough that I was a good sight surer of
this than I’d been of any other major decision I’d ever made?

* * *

I walked into my place Tuesday night to see my favorite
flowers in a vase and some of Mike’s favorites, red wine and dark chocolate,
laid
out on the coffee table.

“You got your favorite wine and chocolate the first time,”
Mike told me later. “It was my turn.”

So it was that Mike, having judged that I was shaking off
the shock, got down on one knee, again.
And proposed, again.

“Because I wanted you to be able to remember it clearly,” he
said.

And so it was that I said yes.
Again.

Eileen Spencer (Lisa’s
grandmother, by phone)

Lisa:
Nanna
, I just wanted to let
you know that Mike and I are engaged.

Nanna
: (relief evident) Oh, good.
We’ve waited and prayed for a
long
time for this!
A
very
long time.

Lisa: NANNA!

Mike: (laughing) I’ve waited a long time for this, too,
Nanna
.

Rosemary Wolfe (Mike’s
mother, by phone)

Mike: Lisa and I are engaged.

Rosemary: Does this mean I have to go somewhere for a
wedding? People at the office suggested that since you’ve dated over email,
perhaps you’d have an e-wedding and we could just log in?

Matt McKay (Lisa’s
brother, by Skype)

Lisa: Mike and I are engaged.

Matt: Wow. Wow. Uh,
wow
.
(Long pause) That’s exciting. Wow. (Long pause)
He’s
a man of action, that one. Wow.

(By Skype 24 hours later)

Matt: I think an engagement for longer than a couple of
months might be good. Don’t go to Vegas in the next three weeks, okay?

Lisa: I promise not to go to Vegas without telling you
first.

Travis
 
(
Lisa’s former
flatmate
, by phone)

Travis: Congratulations. (Pause) Are you serious? (After
confirmation) Holy cow, you’re the craziest person I know.

Juanita Grey (Lisa’s
cousin, by phone)

Lisa: I thought I would ring and tell you I’m engaged.

Juanita: Oh, wow! I won’t insult you by asking who to.

Katy
Vosswinkel
(Mike’s friend, by email)

“CONGRATULATIONS!!! You know, I don't think any engagement
goes off the way you really think it's going to. Well some do, but they're
cheesy.”

Teresa Murray (Mike’s
friend, by email)

“Congratulations! So happy for you and, see, you did find your
mate while in the middle of nowhere. Thank God for technology. And you are not
crazy,
you just know what you want. Life is too short for
waiting. I always knew it would be a woman who would get you out of the field.”

Brandon
Golm
(Mike’s college roommate, by email)

“If she agrees to go to Vegas and get married now, I'll pay
for one for your flights (offer valid in the continental U.S. only!).”

Johanna Bradley
(Lisa’s friend, by email)

“Fantastic news!!
I don’t think
this is too fast. Far too many people spend far too long thinking about getting
married and miss a good year or two of marriage because they can’t make a
decision.”

Tash
White (Lisa’s friend, by phone)

“That’s great! Great!! I was pretty sure this was in the
cards for you two.”

Dave
Sweeting
(Mike’s friend, by email)

“I was sweating a little halfway through your email. I
thought Lisa was going to change her mind. But a happy ending after all, phew.
So I'm guessing, at this rate,
liklik
pikininis
(little children) by Christmas!?”

Dave Baker (Mike’s
friend, by email)

“So, which God-forsaken, disease-ridden, Kalashnikov-toting,
despair-inducing, horsehair-jock self-flagellating, barren/jungle/windswept
wasteland will the wedding be in?”

“Every day is a journey, and the journey
itself is home.”

(Basho)

Ballina
, Australia

We decided not to go for disease-ridden, Kalashnikov-toting,
or despair-inducing when it came to picking a wedding venue. We decided to go
home.

Mine, to be precise.

Or my parents’, to be more precise.

It’s been eight months since Mike proposed and four months
since he packed up in Papua New Guinea and moved his life to Los Angeles. We
did toy with the idea of his staying in PNG until December and just meeting up
in Australia for the wedding, but we decided that that was too
mail-order-spouse even for us. So we’ve been based in the same city for the
past four months. Well, minus the two weeks I was in Africa for work. Oh, and a
quick trip I took to D.C.

In a year full of good decisions, same-city living for a
couple of months before the wedding was one of the best. It has let Mike get
reacquainted with America after seven years away and given us shared
experiences – decorating a Christmas tree, premarital counseling,
learning
that we have very different conceptions of what
constitutes a “fun hike.” Living in the same place has colored in between some
of those lines we sketched out over Skype. The vast majority of those
discoveries have been deliciously fun. Others, well …

“I don’t get it,” Mike said to me just six days ago at Los
Angeles Airport. We were about to board the plane that would take us to Fiji
and then on to Brisbane. I was carrying my wedding dress. It was the start of
what I fully expected would become one of the happiest weeks of my life, and I
was in the mood that commonly afflicts me in airports, frazzled and petulant.

“I don’t get it,” Mike repeated. “You’re such a centered,
rational, cheerful person most of the time. And then you walk into an airport
and become someone completely different.”

“Two words for you,” I said.
“
Cumulative stress.
I’ve been
flying like this since I was seven years old. I hate airports and all the noise
and immigration officers who never know what they’re talking about and being
squished up next to people on planes—”

“I still cannot believe that you booked yourself an aisle
seat and me a window seat for our flight to New Zealand
for our honeymoon.
”

“Oh please,” I said. “This way we’re much more likely to
have a seat spare on our row.
If someone gets put in the
middle, one of us will just switch with them.”

“That’s not the
point
,”
Mike said. “It’s our
honeymoon
. I
want to sit next to you on the plane, regardless.”

“We’ll have plenty of time in New Zealand to sit next to
each other,” I said, unapologetic.

I wonder how long we will have been married before Mike
decides that he really
doesn’t
want
to sit next to me on
planes?

Now it’s the day before the wedding. This morning I’m
sitting on the side porch of the house, in the sun, looking out to sea over the
laptop screen. The feathery leaves of the nearby
poinciana
tree are casting a delicate and
wavery
shade in the
tease of the breeze. Clouds are scurrying around up there, storms threatening,
as they will again tomorrow. This morning I went into the study to check the
weather report and was a little disheartened to see “thunderstorms possible”
listed next to the date of my wedding.

“Oh it’s worse than that,” Mum said cheerfully when I
mentioned this over breakfast. “The report I checked said ‘thunderstorms likely
all day.’”

I’m a bit anxious about this, and a bit upset that I’m
anxious. I want to be the sort of person who is unruffled by the prospect of
rain on her wedding day. I want to be cheerfully adaptable. But I have to admit
that I really
do
hope it doesn’t rain
on my wedding day. Not when we’re getting married in the garden.
Outside.
And having our reception in a
tent.
 

“I bought you this just in case it
does
rain,” Mum said, almost as an afterthought, darting into the
dinning
room and coming back with an enormous, vibrant and
multicolored golf umbrella.

Just looking at this umbrella made me feel
better.
It may well not go as we have hoped and planned tomorrow. It may
well rain. But we will have a rainbow-colorful umbrella that screams
happy
and will look great in
photographs.

Despite the storms that threaten, I’m glad we decided to get
married here. I’ve never lived here – Mum and Dad have lived here only six
years themselves. But here is the place I’ve been coming to relax, regroup, and
re-connect with myself for years. Here, the place where Mike and I first got to
know one another face-to-face. Here, the place of green grass, crimson flowers,
sugar-cane fields, river, beach, and the dense inscrutable blue of the Pacific
Ocean – all spread out in front of me as a feast. Here is about as close to a
place called home as I can get.

* * *

Home has been more about people than place to me for a long
time now, but what I’m still learning is that it can’t be all about people,
either.

As recently as three months ago I forgot this yet again.

We wanted to write our own wedding vows, Mike and I, and we
also wanted to be in sync with what we would promise each other on the day. So
we each put some thought into the vows separately and then came together with
our drafts to blend them into one unified declaration.

I think my favorite section of our vows is what we settled
on for the ring exchange: “As I give you this ring, I give you my heart as a
sanctuary. I give you myself as a faithful companion to celebrate life with. I
give you my promise that as I choose you today, so I will choose you tomorrow.
This is our covenant.”

To get to these four simple sentences, we each had to make a
compromise that initially felt quite painful.

“We can’t say it that way,” Mike said when he saw my draft.
“The second sentence ends with a preposition.”

“What’s a preposition?” I asked.

Mike looked at me, suspicious.

“
You
,” he said,
“are a
novelist
. How can you
possibly
not know what a preposition
is?”

“Hey,” I said a trifle sharply.
“Six
countries.
Six schools.
English grammar got
lost somewhere along the way, possibly while I was busy learning
Shona
in Zimbabwe.”

“You can’t end a sentence with the word
with
,” Mike said. “It’s just wrong. Another way to say it would be
‘I give you myself as a faithful companion with whom to celebrate life.’”

“That sounds
lame
,”
I said, displaying a vocabulary every bit as impressive as my grasp on grammar.

“Well, at least it’s correct.”

“But it
sounds
dumb,” I said. “Clumsy.
Formal.
It doesn’t fit the
tone of the rest of our vows. Who cares if it’s correct if it sounds dumb?”

Mike eventually shifted on that issue and I shifted on this
one: When I first drafted this section, I put an extra sentence in there. That
sentence was “You will be home to me.”

“I don’t like that,” Mike said when he saw it. “It doesn’t
work.”

I was initially disappointed, but there was something in me
that sensed he might just be right, so I took it out without making too much of
a fuss, and now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to mull it over, I do think he
was right after all. For one thing, that phrase is arguably less a promise than
it is a statement, or even a demand.

I hadn’t intended that. I had intended that sentence to
evoke all that is most positive in the ideal of home – comfort, continuity,
understanding, haven, refuge, rest, encouragement, wholeness – the sum total of
all that is most precious and valuable in life. I had intended it as a promise
along the lines of “I will seek these things in you, for you, and with you.”

The problem here lies in the first part of that promise that
I was trying to craft, the idea that it’s possible to find all of that
in
someone else. It’s too much to expect
(or even hope for) from any one person, even your lover. It’s too much to
expect from other people altogether.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think people are
key
.
Relationships are primary, perhaps even central, to the concept of home. It’s
always been people who granted the most meaning and emotional heft to place for
me, not the other way around. The happiest times of my life have been steeped
in my richest community experiences. They had far less to do with where I was
than with who was there with me.

I am reminded of a day several years ago when I was
returning to L.A. from Amsterdam after a string of work trips. I was exhausted
and dazed in that way that I get after too many sterile announcements about
seat belts, life jackets, baggage carousels, and what color sign you can find
the ride-share vans under. Familiarity is not always a good thing, and Los
Angeles Airport is a case in point. It is one place where repetition has
definitely
not
bred the happy
emotional resonance we all want to associate with home. I dislike that airport
with a passion that is rather unreasonable in magnitude and intensity.

That day, however, I didn’t have to drag myself through
collecting my bags or endure a circuitous shared ride back to my apartment.
That day, when I came down the escalators near baggage claim, four familiar
faces were waiting. They’d figured out which plane I would be on and decided to
surprise me at the airport. They greeted me with homemade signs that read,
“Welcome home!” and, “There’s no place like home!!” And suddenly I
was
home in that moment, even in that
airport, because they were there.
       

But friends and family are only part of the puzzle of home.
They are the biggest and most important part, I do believe, but still only
part. There is another level to home, a level where other people, no matter how
close and loving, have only so much access and impact. A level everyone
ultimately plumbs alone.

* * *

The word
home
comes from a root meaning “the place where one lies.” The phrase refers to our
physical place of residence and rest, our bed, but it also prompts me to
consider where the core of the “one” that is me – who I am, my soul – lies. It
makes me think of identity, purpose, passion, and being at home in my own skin.

This one is a work in progress.

Last night my sister and girlfriends organized a little
pre-wedding
girls
night. There were eight of us,
Champagne, chocolate, strawberries, some practical pajamas, some
not-so-practical saucy red lingerie, lots of chatter, and a surprise videotape.

Two of my bridesmaids,
Tash
and
Ani
, had decided that since none of my friends had met Mike
more than once and therefore had quite a limited basis for deciding whether to
give this marriage their stamp of approval, perhaps it might be a good idea to
concoct a test to see how in sync Mike and I are with each other. So they
cornered Mike with a video camera, asked him a long list of questions, and
taped his responses. Then they brought this video to the party and played it
bit by bit, stopping at the appropriate places (after they’d asked a question
and before Mike answered) to make me guess what his answer would be.

This might sound like a bit of lighthearted fun, but those
two went to town with their questions. They were hard!

What first attracted you to Lisa?

What do you like most about Lisa?

What do you think Lisa likes most about
you
?

That was just the warm-up. In fourteen minutes of footage
they also covered what physical attributes of mine Mike likes the most and
which of his he thinks I like?
Ideal travel destinations?
How many kids, if any, do we both want? How does Mike feel about my writing
essays about the trials and tribulations of married life? If he were on a hike
with me and I decided I’d had enough, sat down, and refused to go on, what
would he do? What does Mike think of my driving, my cooking, and my
house-cleaning? What is my favorite color? What really turns me on?

Mike was calm, composed and a perfect gentleman (except when
he said that although he chose to believe that I was
capable
of house-cleaning, he had yet to see any evidence that this
was true). The only time he looked completely panicked was when he was asked
about my favorite color.

“What’s Lisa’s favorite color?” Mike repeated, laughing and
bewildered. “I have no idea.
Por
favor!
Is it …
uh … uh …”

“This is a bonus question for bonus points,”
Tash
taunted him from off-screen.

“Did she put it in any essays?” Mike said. “How am I
supposed to know Lisa’s favorite color? Um … is it … blue?”

Wrong. Favorite-color
fail
.

But I was both heartened and a little relieved to see that
we
are
pretty much in sync on most of
the other questions. I didn’t know what Mike was going to pinpoint as what he
likes most about me, but this is what he said: “I like most Lisa’s confidence
in who she is and how she approaches the world around her, wishing to engage in
it and striving to respond to others as she is able.”