The Startup Wife(10)
With a flourish, Julian reached into his front pocket and pulled out a hat—not a fedora or a beret but one of those cones that children wear at birthday parties. The cone said CONGRATULATIONS. We made our way merrily inside. On the second floor, a tiny seed of doubt took hold. What was I doing? It had been a summer—not even that—and here I was in a plain dress and flip-flops. I went over the arguments that Cyrus and I had rehearsed with each other. We both hated weddings. It would save us months of dating, which neither of us had ever liked.
But really, it was none of those things. There was both a very good reason and no reason at all for Cyrus and me to get married within a few weeks of meeting again. The good reason was that we were in love, or at least we believed ourselves to be in love, and for me the feeling was so strong that it felt like the first time I had ever believed in anything. But also, doing something so irrational both fit into who I wanted to be—a person who chooses her own destiny—and yet told me something entirely new about the world, which is that things that seemed impossible and out of my reach, like marrying a man I had teenage dreams about—were actually within my grasp, and all I had to do was stretch out my greedy little hands and take what was mine.
When we approached the town clerk who would marry us, I suddenly wished I were holding a purse, one of those things people call a clutch. I would’ve liked to be clutching something—flowers! God, why didn’t we have flowers? We had nothing but a giant friend in a paper hat.
The clerk, a woman in a blue pantsuit that was perhaps one size too small, was stationed behind a podium. Cyrus handed her the marriage license. Julian pulled out his phone and started recording. The clerk asked us how to pronounce our names. SIGH-RUS and AH-SHAH, we said. She examined each one of us in turn and, seemingly satisfied, turned to her podium. Cyrus and I held hands and waited.
“We are gathered here at this hour to join Asha Ray and Cyrus Jones in marriage,” she began.
Upon hearing my name, tears came to my eyes.
“Today is the day you have chosen to formally and legally declare your commitment to each other. Marriage is among the most serious of all decisions. You are willingly entering into an intimate pact of trust and love.”
Since we had decided against a ceremony, I hadn’t expected so many words. The words moved inside me and I started to sob. Cyrus squeezed my hand.
“As equal partners, you will share the privileges, sacrifices, and responsibilities that come with the union. As your relationship continues to grow, you will face the challenge of being true to each other while remaining true to your individual selves.
“Asha, do you take Cyrus to be your lawful wedded spouse?”
“I do,” I said.
“And Cyrus, do you take Asha to be your lawful wedded spouse?”
“I do,” he said. Julian changed positions and pointed his phone at me. Then the clerk said—was that a crack in her voice? yes, with a crack in her voice—“By the power vested in me as a justice of the peace, and most important of all, by the power of your own love, I now pronounce you legally married.” And we kissed, a short, melting kiss mixed with the salt of our tears, the particular flavor of which I knew I would remember forever.
And so it was, without ritual, in the most ordinary of ways, that we were married. I moved into Jules’s house and put my clothes into Cyrus’s closet. I put my electric toothbrush in the bathroom and plugged in my phone charger, and that was it. I was ready to start a life with Cyrus, who was everything he had been all those years ago when I first met him: mostly human, a little bit cartoon, a tiny bit ghost.
Two
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Once the semester started, I was in class all day and at the lab late into the evening. Cyrus packed lunches for me in a metal bento box, and we walked together up to the T. At the lab, I thought about telling a few people, but then I didn’t. Would being married take away from my persona as a futurist soothsayer? Definitely. And Dr. Stein would not approve. I kept my head down and acted like nothing had happened.
But everything was different. I hadn’t changed my name, but sometimes I woke up in the morning and heard myself saying, “Good morning, Mrs. Jones.” Or when I was putting our clothes in the dryer, I heard, “Doing laundry for your husband, Mrs. Jones?” Mrs. Jones kept me up at night. She was my shadow self, a laundry-doing, husband-pleasing ordinary person who wanted nothing more than to be an excellent wife. I had vivid fantasies about murdering Mrs. Jones and burying her in the tangle of weeds that passed for Julian’s garden.
Despite my fear of becoming Mrs. Jones, my work changed for the better. Being with Cyrus made me feel powerful, as if I had somehow conjured him out of my dreams. All the ambitions I had around the Empathy Module suddenly felt within my reach, because if the two of us, after all these years, could find each other again, then surely I was capable of taking some of that magic and putting it into my human replica. I plunged into my work with new ambition, and though Dr. Stein continued to ignore me, it mattered less. I hummed through my days, and when I was finished, I went home to Julian’s.
Julian’s house was grand, but as the days grew colder, I discovered it had a major flaw: it was freezing. The windows were too big and the wood was all warped, so even if we stuffed towels under the doors, it was still drafty. I tried to use the toilet in the lab as much as possible, because peeing in that house was like attempting an arctic expedition.