The Longest Date: Life as a Wife (7 page)

Step Seven: Involve Professionals
.
Ian and I decided it’s not cheating to buy a course or two. In fact, it can be fun (albeit expensive) to include the world’s best crab cakes flown in fresh from Baltimore if a guest chooses crab as one of her ingredients, or even if she hasn’t. It’s sometimes comforting to know that at least one course will be edible and worry-free, so we have flown in Faidley’s crab cakes, Eileen’s cheesecakes, Varsano’s chocolates, Lobel’s steaks, and my mom’s cookies (she makes more than just Toll House cookies, and they’re always crowd-pleasers).

Step Eight: Enjoy.
This, for me, might be the hardest part, to relax and “enjoy” the evening when I know there are still four courses that need our attention, but I do find that if we invite only two to four people, instead of eight (which seems to be Ian’s minimum), I have a shot at enjoying the dinner as much as our guests. I love when a group is small enough to have one conversation; otherwise, it always seems that giant bursts of laughter are coming from the end of the table where I am not. A small group means the cooking is more manageable, and you don’t miss any laughs. And there are always plenty, because this is a long, luxurious, many-course night, and it does seem that when you share your home, people seem more comfortable sharing their stories.

And these are stories I have not heard!

So, once the dinner is under way, whether it’s working or not, I try (which is also a process) to be in the moment and enjoy. I try to let the dishes pile up. I try to let the time between courses lag. I try to take in what is happening, because it is still astounding to me the meals and the friendships we have made.

We’ve invited couples we didn’t know so well who have become great friends. We’ve cooked for houseguests, like my best friend from college and her husband (who chose rhubarb, not because he wanted to make life difficult, but because his mother makes a killer rhubarb crisp, and now I love cooking with rhubarb). I included a colleague who later became one of my dearest friends, Padma (Atluri, not Lakshmi), because she happened to mention she loved pumpkin when we were already planning a dinner that featured pumpkin (the birth of my famous pumpkin vodka). So sometimes the ingredients dictate the guest list, and sometimes the person who picks the ingredients dictates the guest list by bringing a few friends along for the treat. Once we invited four friends and let each pick one ingredient.

Surrendering control of everything from the ingredients to the guest list, trusting other people’s choices, trusting Ian that the night will work out . . . I have to admit, it’s all been good for me. Not easy. But good. Before marrying Ian, I never would have tried to update Peking duck (it’s an ancient recipe!), but our roasted duck with farmers’ market scallions and homemade thyme pancakes with pomegranate reduction was one of the most delicious dishes I have had anywhere, and I had it in my living room.

I guess the old me did operate from fear when it came to entertaining. I would buy food in advance. I would try to visualize how everyone would get along, try to bulletproof the evening. But just as I’ve learned that any four ingredients can be the basis of a great meal, I’ve learned that we can enjoy any combination of the people we love, because if each guest is special and amazing to us, by dessert they’ll find one another just as special and amazing.

These elaborate menus we’ve attempted, these culinary leaps of faith—they’ve forced me to get out of my comfort zone, to fail at times and understand that it will be okay, to be surprised by what Ian and I can do as a team, and to marvel at what I can do as an individual within that team. So my extreme sport of choice is, in fact, a team sport. And maybe it’s just one event in the grueling Olympic team sport that is marriage.

I can report, with confidence, that Ian and I have both grown from these dinners. In size. Apparently, we can’t eat unlimited amounts of food without gaining weight. I’m glad Ian loves me at various weights (so far), and I love him at various weights, but we’ve had to scale back our dinner parties thanks to our scale, and we’re trying to eliminate a few courses from our own daily diet.

At the moment, we’re down to just dessert and vodka.

I
wish I could say that all wives experience this at one time or another, but I fear it’s just me. I have been watching Ian literally rappelling down the side of a building with a garden hose wrapped around his waist.

It’s actually kind of impressive.

It would be more impressive if Ian were not the one who had locked us out of Jason and Meredith’s apartment in the first place, leaving the four of us stranded on their roof deck with a bottle of wine and the new baby we’d come to see. But luckily, this was not the first time I found Ian rappelling.

Ian and I learned to rappel on a waterfall in Costa Rica. It was part of a mom-and-pop zip-line tour run by the family who owned the land, designed the course, and even met us at the Turrialba bus station in their pickup truck.

I support mom-and-pop shops, but the jury is still out on mom-and-pop adventure travel. I know we’re a litigious society here in America, but once you’re in the back of a stranger’s truck surrounded by harnesses and ropes, you might begin to wonder if the threat of lawsuits and the ubiquitous waivers and safety regulations and warnings and roped-off danger areas are maybe a good thing. I also began to wonder why the hell I agreed to do this. I wasn’t eighteen anymore.

Oh, yeah, that’s why I agreed to do it.

I was still single at the time, and being single in your late thirties means you have to do some seriously stupid shit to prove you’re still fun, like ride in the back of a pickup, rappel down a waterfall, or go on a two-day river-rafting/camping trip, which Ian scheduled for after we rappelled down a waterfall.

Clearly, Costa Rica was an early trip for us. In fact, it was a trip Ian had planned before he met me, and he told me repeatedly (in addition to the fact that he was not looking for a relationship) that he would be going to Central America for a few months, and I shouldn’t try to stop him.

I, in fact, had no intention of stopping him. I’m not sure what kind of controlling women he’d been with in the past, but I like to travel alone sometimes, and I respected the fact that he did, too.

Then, a few weeks before his departure, he sheepishly asked if I wanted to join him in Costa Rica. And that was our courtship in a nutshell. Ian would firmly announce whatever he was absolutely
not
going to do (have an exclusive relationship, or say “I love you” very often) and then would do the opposite. He still says “I love you” almost every day, and to the best of my knowledge we are still exclusive. I think he preferred to start with establishing low or no expectations so he could be happily surprising instead of sorely disappointing, which was a good strategy, because I usually started with unreasonably high expectations and had nowhere to go but down. Much like being at the top of a waterfall.

In Costa Rica our relationship literally got off the ground when we did this zip-line tour, because Ian was impressed that I was so game for everything. He started the trip alone with a Spanish immersion course, and I flew to Costa Rica to meet him, which, after I landed, involved driving two hours in a car with no A/C on a road that every so often was cut off by a body of water that my Spanish-only-speaking driver would nonchalantly drive through. I met Ian’s host family and drank the lemonade I was offered (even though I’d been told absolutely not to drink the water), because I didn’t want to insult them, and before I knew it, I was in a pickup truck headed for a family-owned ropes course.

I was
quite
game, come to think of it, and oddly good at rappelling, especially considering that I missed part of the safety briefing when I got distracted.

Our guide was wearing a harness as he spoke, and the harness fits around your thighs and cinches up around your shoulders, so if you are a tan man wearing shorts, which he was, it basically lifts and accentuates your penis. I don’t think that’s intentional, but this guy helped design the course, so you be the judge.

He was saying something to the effect of “This is very important: when you lean back, don’t—” which is when I got distracted. Frankly, I think tan, muscular Latin men should not wear a harness when giving a safety lecture to women. I thought my momentary lapse went undetected, but that night at dinner, Ian said, “Were you checking out our guide’s package?” and I did a spit take, an actual spit take with liquid spewing out of my mouth, which we laugh about to this day.

Ian, being straight (as opposed to other men I have married), was not distracted during the instructions, which is why he came up with the idea of wrapping a garden hose around his waist years later when we were trapped on a roof deck, as our friends and their baby stared in awe.

Let me add that it was not so awesome at first, when Ian flung himself over the railing without the aid of a garden hose and tried to balance on a sconce, from which he planned to jump to our friends’ balcony below. The sconce immediately fell off the wall, which left Ian clinging to the edge of the roof like an action hero, except he wasn’t an action hero, so it occurred to me that this might be how our relationship was going to end, with Ian hanging there until his fingers slipped, and then I would have to replace a husband and a sconce.

We managed to pull him back up, but he remained on what I will call “the wrong side of the railing.” Then he spotted the garden hose on the roof deck behind us, wrapped around a large spindle, and he yelled, “Hand me the hose!” and we all told him to stop, it was too dangerous, but he looked me in the eyes with confidence, and repeated the order,
“Hand me the hose.”

I did what he asked, and as he looped the hose around his waist, I told him I loved him, but this was stupid. (I thought it might be my last chance to say the words “This is stupid.”) Then, making sure there was no slack in the hose, and using the railing for leverage, Ian planted his feet flat on the side of the building and started to lean back. That’s when I finally realized what he was doing and said, “Oh, like the waterfall!” And he smiled and proceeded to walk down the side of the apartment as we fed him the hose, just as we had walked down a waterfall, except there was no guide, no safety harness, and no real reason to do it.

Somewhere a landlord had a key to the apartment, but Ian was on a mission.

So we didn’t ask anyone in the small crowd that was forming below to call the landlord or a locksmith. Instead we watched and then applauded as Ian dropped down to the balcony, opened the sliding glass door, walked through the apartment, unlocked the door he had accidentally locked, went up the stairs to the roof deck, and rescued us and the baby.

Jason claims he decided then and there that Ian would be his law partner, and they still have a boutique firm together today. Ian had passed the test.

And I had passed the “travel test” early on, when I went to Central America with Ian. I did several things on that trip that were out of my comfort zone in addition to rappelling down a waterfall—like traveling without any real itinerary; carrying a backpack instead of a suitcase; going without showering; showering without hot water; hiking for ten hours in one day, only to do it again the next day, and the next, and the next to get to Machu Picchu at sunrise; staying with a local family in Lake Titicaca and dressing up in native garb to dance (despite the high altitude, which made dancing challenging even if you weren’t cinched into a native dress); spending a night on a bus, and using the bus bathroom, which was clearly visible from the street when the bus stopped—and, of course, the bus stopped just at the moment that I had finally worked up the nerve to enter said bathroom, so I was on view, hovering above the tin hole that was the toilet, for all of the elderly Peruvians boarding the bus to see. That was
certainly
out of my comfort zone. And theirs.

Ian did things that were out of his comfort zone, too, like staying a few nights at the Four Seasons Resort Costa Rica at Peninsula Papagayo, which I had arranged like an oasis of hot food (and hot water) in the middle of our trip. For Ian, staying at a Four Seasons was akin to voting Republican. He couldn’t even tell his friends he was doing it. (Years later, at the Amansomethingorother, Ian would be the one on the phone to the concierge, complaining that we didn’t get turndown service and that our minibar needed refilling, but this was early in our travels together, and we were still getting used to each other’s lifestyle.)

The thing about passing a travel test in a relationship is that all it really means is that you’ve graduated to the next trip, where you will be given a different travel test. For example, no sooner had I passed my Central American test and established myself firmly as Ian’s girlfriend than I had to start training for the international competition that was being held in the south of France.

We had been invited by Ian’s best (and frankly, most beautiful) friends, Philippe and Amy, to celebrate Philippe’s fortieth birthday at his family’s sprawling summer home in the south of France. We would be joining their fabulous international friends, eating delicious French food, and swimming at the gorgeous French Riviera, and I was dreading it, because Ian said there was talk of a surprise Amy was planning for Philippe’s birthday, a show or performance of some kind, and all the women would be participating, me included, and we might be topless.

Excuse me,
what
?

The details were vague, and as I was getting them through Ian, I never got anything like the full picture, but the partial picture was enough to start giving me anxiety about the trip. I asked Ian to tell Amy that if the women would be doing a topless “can-can,” his girlfriend “can’t-can’t,” but we were still very much looking forward to the trip.

He said, “Let’s just go and see what it is,” which I took to mean that he didn’t want to seem uncool (like his girlfriend was uncool) to these people, his coolest of cool friends.

The details continued to be slow in coming even once we got to France. We were all much too busy enjoying the food, wine, cheese, bread, beach, pool, and view, but I never stopped secretly dreading the “show.”

I finally learned that it wasn’t a show, it was a
tableau vivant
, which is a live reenactment of a painting. I don’t know if there was an actual painting we were reenacting—if there was, I never saw it—but I gathered there would be topless women at the center of it, fanned out like a flower.

I finally worked up the nerve to tell Amy that although I was so appreciative to be included in the festivities, I really didn’t feel comfortable being topless. And that is when Amy assured me that I wasn’t supposed to be—I was going to be in a toga serving grapes or reading books or something equally benign on the fringes of the “painting,” while she and her friends who had been models like her (did I mention she had been a model?) would be topless.

I was torn between being insulted and relieved. It was like breaking up with someone who didn’t know he was dating you. But there was no time to be embarrassed. The men were already sequestered inside the house, and the women were scurrying around the grounds, spreading out flowers, preparing to become a living painting that may or may not have existed in real life.

The models stripped down to their G-strings and sprayed themselves with gold paint as nonchalantly as if they did this every day. I was given a sheet with which to fashion a toga, and I was told I could put it on over my sundress, making me feel like the least naked person in the south of France. And then I was spray-painted gold—maybe as a consolation prize—and given a book of poetry and positioned to look as if I was reading to my friend Liz, and she was finding the whole thing (and my nervousness) hilarious, which worked for her character, because she was supposed to be midlaugh, enjoying the poetry I was reading to her, as our friend Christina (also in toga) stood by holding a ceramic pitcher.

Finally Amy announced that we were ready, and we all held perfectly still for five minutes as the men (and Philippe’s parents!) viewed us from the house’s wraparound porch. I am told it was quite breathtaking from above. I felt silly, not because I was in a toga spray-painted gold, but because I had wasted so much time and energy worrying about this
tableau vivant
when there was so much more to worry about.

There was all-night dancing (in clubs and at the summer house), techno music (in clubs and at the summer house), chicken fights in the pool (and even though Ian was game for chicken fighting, I really didn’t see the victory in pushing a ninety-pound model off someone’s shoulders), so the whole trip seemed to accentuate my not-comfortable-being-nakedness, physically and emotionally. And although Ian always loves me and my body, he doesn’t love when my feelings about my body keep me (and us) from having fun. So I have to concede that my rampant insecurities caused me to fail the South of France test, but I was determined to improve in the future. I would try, on future trips, to do as Ian does: just go and see what it is.

That’s how I found myself at a Ping-Pong show in Thailand.

Ian and I were married at that point, and Thailand was a “last hurrah” trip. It wasn’t our first last hurrah, and it wouldn’t be our last, but as our baby quest became more science project than sex, we used travel as a consolation prize when things didn’t work out, and as a last hurrah even if they only seemed like they might, because we’d been cleared for yet another round of IVF. Subsequently we spent a lot of money on travel.

In Chiang Mai we had a Valentine’s Day date that was as over-the-top glamorous as something you’d see on
The Bachelor
. It’s sad that my idea of romance is now shaped by
The Bachelor
, but this night in Chiang Mai was truly television-worthy. We were led down a paper lantern–lit path to a private gazebo overlooking the rice paddies; musicians serenaded us with Thai music; we had a delicious five-course meal; and afterward we lit a candle that launched a traditional rice paper hot-air balloon into the starry sky, sending to the heavens a wish we no longer had to say aloud.

There was, however, one wish Ian did say aloud on our last night in Thailand, and it was one of the least romantic things he’s ever proposed: he wanted us to see a sex show in Patpong.