You Think It, I'll Say It(29)
He’d proposed to me on New Year’s Eve 2007, which we had spent at home, watching National Lampoon’s Vacation and drinking champagne. It wasn’t even eleven P.M., as the credits rolled, when he turned and said, “There’s something I was thinking about during the movie. I was thinking we should get married.” I know this isn’t a particularly romantic proposal, but I was so happy that I didn’t realize there was no ring.
He was the one who said, a few minutes later, that together we should select something without diamonds.
“Because of the whole blood-diamond thing?” I asked.
“There’s that,” he said. “But mostly I just think they’re tacky and ostentatious.”
“But you’re fine spending shitloads of money in ways other people can’t see?”
He smiled. “Pretty much.”
“Jason, engagement rings have diamonds in them. It’s the norm.”
“Yeah, because 1940s jewelers brainwashed generations of American women.”
“Is this about…” I hesitated, searching for a diplomatic way to put it. “The expense?”
He seemed more amused than offended. “I’m not indigent. You really can’t believe that I just think diamonds are ugly?”
“It seems awfully convenient.”
He shrugged. “I’m happy to get you a ring with some other kind of stone.”
I hadn’t previously given the matter much thought, but not having a diamond engagement ring suddenly seemed like being fake-engaged—being “engaged.” Months before he’d proposed, we’d agreed that if we got married, it would be at the courthouse, with only our families present, and it wasn’t as if I was going to wear a big white dress. Was wanting this one token of the establishment all that materialistic? I said, “What if I say I really want a diamond ring?”
Still amiable, still unruffled, Jason said, “Then you should buy one for yourself.”
And then—I’m not sure which of us was calling the other’s bluff—I did. Three days later, I walked into the Tiffany’s on Michigan Avenue and walked out an hour later with a $38,000 cushion-cut ring that I’d charged to my Platinum Amex. This was a sum I’d never have let Jason spend, or spent on myself, if I weren’t trying to make a point. And, of course, the ring didn’t fit right—it was too big, but I took it anyway, figuring I’d get it sized later. Outside the door of our condo, I put the ring on, and inside, when I held out my left hand to Jason, he said, “Whatever floats your boat, Magpie,” and I burst into tears. He ended up putting his arm around my shoulders as we sat on the couch and I sobbed and said, “I don’t understand why we can’t just be a regular couple.”
“What does that even mean?” he asked.
The next day, over dinner, he gave me a pair of fair-trade malachite earrings from India. Because I am either needy or an asshole or both, I later went to the store they’d come from to see how much they cost. They were seventy-four dollars.
* * *
—
By the time we were half an hour past the trailhead leading to Moose Lake, Jason and Ed were twenty yards ahead of Ashley and me. Sometimes I could hear the men’s voices but not their words, and I wondered what they were discussing. Ashley had been telling me about her job, which was in the marketing department of a gas company in Stamford, Connecticut; Ed worked as a developer in commercial construction. “I’m about to switch gears, though,” she said. “I’m starting my own PR firm, me and this other girl.”
“Cool,” I said.
The trail was narrow, and Ashley was walking in front of me. Over her shoulder, she said, “I have this moron for a boss, and it’s like, Why should I do all the work and he gets all the credit?” Below her daypack, I could see her little butt, encased in jogging shorts, and her tan, shapely legs, which ended in gray wool socks and hiking boots. Even though we were surrounded by birch trees and wildflowers and distant snow-peaked mountains, my attention was on Ashley—I detested myself for this, and I also couldn’t help it.
“You know the number one thing people say when I tell them I’m starting a business?” she continued. “They’re like, ‘But don’t you want kids? You’re not getting any younger!’?”
“There’s definitely a double standard,” I said.
“Not that I don’t want kids ever,” she said. “But why rush? Do you guys want children?”
“Maybe,” I said. The real answer was very likely not, but I had learned from experience that revealing the truth would elicit a torrent of protests about the cuteness of tiny toes and fingers, the unique meaning imbued by parenthood. None of which I doubted, but I was fine not experiencing the toes, fingers, or unique meaning firsthand. To be a senior partner at Corster, I couldn’t work less than I already did—I usually billed upwards of two hundred hours a month—and I didn’t see the point of enduring pregnancy and childbirth and then hiring someone else to raise my kid while I was racked with guilt. Jason was more on the fence. He’d said he could go either way, which made it seem like deciding whether to sit at a booth or a table in a restaurant, but I didn’t want to press the point in case he came down on the pro-kid side.
Ashley said, “Everyone tries to scare you, like, tick, tick, tick, but two of the women in my office got pregnant when they were forty.”