Calypso(30)
I finally got a signal at the post office in the neighboring village. I’d gone to mail a set of keys to a friend and, afterward, I went out front and pulled out my iPad. The touch of a finger and there it was, the headline story on the New York Times site: “Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide.”
I read it and, probably like every American gay person, I was overcome with emotion. Standing on the sidewalk, dressed in rags with a litter picker pinioned between my legs, I felt my eyes tear up, and as my vision blurred I considered all the people who had fought against this and thought, Take that, assholes.
The Supreme Court ruling tells every gay fifteen-year-old living out in the middle of nowhere that he or she is as good as any other dope who wants to get married. To me it was a slightly mixed message, like saying we’re all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden. Then I spoke to my accountant, who’s as straight as they come, and he couldn’t have been more excited. “For tax purposes, you and Hugh really need to act on this,” he told me.
“But I don’t want to,” I said. “I don’t believe in marriage.”
He launched into a little speech, and here’s the thing about legally defined couples: they save boatloads of money, especially when it comes to inheriting property. My accountant told me how much we had to gain, and I was, like, “Is there a waiting period? What documents do I need?”
That night, I proposed for the first of what eventually numbered eighteen times. “Listen,” I said to Hugh over dinner, “we really need to do this. Otherwise when one of us dies, the other will be clobbered with taxes.”
“I don’t care,” he told me. “It’s just money.”
This is a sentence that does not register on Greek ears. It’s just a mango-size brain tumor. It’s just the person I hired to smother you in your sleep. But since when is money just money?
“I’m not marrying you,” he repeated.
I swore to him that I was not being romantic about it: “There’ll be no rings, no ceremony, no celebration of any kind. We won’t tell anyone but the accountant. Think of it as a financial contract, nothing more.”
“No.”
“Goddamn it,” I said. “You are going to marry me whether you like it or not.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Oh, yes you are.”
After two weeks of this, he slammed his fork on the table, saying, “I’ll do anything just to shut you up.” This is, I’m pretty sure, the closest I’m likely to get to a yes.
I took another ear of corn. “Fine, then. It’s settled.”
It wasn’t until the following day that the reality set in. I was out on the side of a busy road with my litter picker, collecting the shreds of a paper coffee cup that had been run over by a lawn mower, when I thought of having to tick the box that says “married” instead of “single.” I always thought there should have been another option, as for the past twenty-four years I’ve been happily neither. I would never introduce Hugh as my husband, nor would he refer to me that way, but I can easily imagine other people doing it. They’d be the type who so readily embraced “partner” when it came down the pike, in the midnineties. Well-meaning people. The kind who wear bike helmets. It occurred to me while standing there, cars whizzing by, that the day I marry is the day I’ll get hit and killed, probably by some driver who’s texting or, likelier still, sexting. “He is survived by his husband, Hugh Hamrick,” the obituary will read, and before I’m even in my grave I’ll be rolling over in it.
That night at dinner, neither of us mentioned the previous evening’s conversation. We talked about this and that, our little projects, the lives of our neighbors, and then we retreated to different parts of the house—engaged, I suppose, our whole lives ahead of us.
The Silent Treatment
Aside from an occasional dinner party thrown by one of his neighbors, the only thing my father gets dressed up for anymore is church. When I was young he’d drop my sisters and me off in time for Sunday school, then head to the club to play golf and return at the end of the service, most often after everyone else had left and it was just us standing alone in front of the shuttered building. Now, though, he’s there every week.
“In a suit?” I asked.
“Well, of course,” he said. “What do you think?” It was late May and he was sitting on the deck at the Sea Section, looking out at the ocean, which was relatively calm that day and topaz-colored. Amy and Lisa were at the table too. Hugh had made us BLTs, and as he set them before us, my father rubbed his hands together. “Fantastic!”
Even in his old age he’s a good-looking man, skin still fairly taut, with an enviable, easy-to-draw nose, all straight line with no bumps. I’d love to have inherited it, but instead I resemble my mother—nostrils big enough to stuff olives into. He still has most of his hair, my father, some of it relatively dark. On this day it was covered by a flat-topped cap I’d bought him in London. It was made of cotton, with a bright pattern of small checks, and though when I gave it to him he claimed to hate it, he’d been wearing it since he arrived.
“Why do you want to know what I wear to church?” he asked.
I brought up a barbecue restaurant Hugh, Amy, and I had stopped at a few days earlier on our way from Raleigh to Emerald Isle. It was noon on Sunday in a small eastern North Carolina town. I figured that most everyone had come from church and found it interesting that the only men in jackets and ties were Mexican. “The rest of them had Dockers on and polo shirts,” I said. “Women wore slacks as well.”