David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

When I first moved in with him, he said, “Will you still goose me while you’re changing my Depends?”

“Depends,” I said.

“Well said.” This was before people started saying “Well played.” “But how about this? We’ll buy them in bulk—so much Depends upon a red wheel barrow.”

Okay, I haven’t convinced you, and obviously the Frank Gehry thing doesn’t show him to advantage. But even my mother was sold—and if you want to think I was bought, fine, but that’s not how it felt.

—

The day my divorce became final—I’d been living with him for a little over a year—he took me to the Beekman Arms. “I hope you don’t mind my being blunt,” he said. “We don’t need to have this conversation again, but you do realize that things could get a little unattractive in the homestretch.”

“ You don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said. “I could get cancer, and you’d have to pretend you were still hot for me. No boobs, no hair…”

“Maybe I’d like you better—you know my peculiarities. Still, the odds are in my favor, no? So—how to put this—if and when you should feel the need for more congenial company, do try to hide it a little better than you did with Young Lochinvar. But I’d be forever grateful if you could see your way clear to sticking around for the last act, in whatever capacity—well, of course not forever grateful. Okay, there. How’s that for a tender marriage proposal?”

I put my glass down. “That’s what this is?”

“All right, I knew I was getting too poetic,” he said. “I’d better just assume the position.” He stood up, went down on one knee beside my chair and took my hand. The people at the next table looked, then looked away.

“Good Christ,” I said. “We’re really doing this?”

“I think we’d be fine,” he said. “We could still pretend to be illicit—we’ll get you a pair of those heart-shaped sunglasses. Do you need some time?”

I shook my head. “I’d just start to think.”

“Never a good idea.” He kissed my hand and went back to his chair. “This calls for champagne. Joke, joke. Here.” He raised his glass of scotch. “To the loveliest widow in the Hudson Valley—in the far-distant future.” He took a sip and reached down to rub his knee. “I’m really not coldhearted, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t think I am either.”

“Well,” he said. “That part is your business.”

—

So, a month later I was taking that shower, on the morning I was to be married for the second time, in the bath off the master bedroom, while he was getting dressed on the other side of the wall. I came out in a towel—he had the biggest, softest white towels, though maybe that was to his ex-wife’s credit—with makeup and hair just right, as he was knotting his ironic bow tie. Not a clip-on: I was about to marry a man who knew how to do this. I saw him see me in the mirror. “Hmm,” he said. “You know, they can’t start without us.” Was I not being prompted to pull out an end of his tie with my teeth? Grrr—c’mere, Tiger.

—

We had the wedding downstairs in the living room, with white orchids on the Guatemalan coffee table. I’d just wanted the two of us to go to the town clerk, but he insisted we invite some family—“to keep things on the up and up”—and find a Unitarian Universalist clergyperson to do a plain-Jane service: no scripture, no music, no e. e. cummings. His parents were long dead, but his brother, whom I’d never met, said he’d drive up from the city. His daughter told him she’d booked a flight from Portland, but she called the morning she was to leave and said she’d woken up with an ear infection and couldn’t lift her head from the pillow. Okay, you did hear of this happening. My mother came up the night before and stayed at the house, and my brother flew in with his wife and their one-year-old. We had room for them too, and my mother claimed she wanted to reconnect with my brother, meet the wife and spend time with the grandchild she’d never seen. But he told me that he and his wife had prayed about sleeping under the same roof with a still-unmarried couple, and while he didn’t judge, he needed to be a servant leader in his family and it was best for them to live their values. We offered to put them up at the Beekman Arms, but they’d booked a room at a Motel 6 and would drive over in the morning.

He showed up an hour before the ceremony—we’d just come downstairs, and I could feel still-premarital slime in the crotch of my underwear—with the bossy little big-breasted wife holding the kid, who was sucking his thumb. “Your brother’s told me all about you,” she said. “And this is Zacharias. He’s a little shy. Well, congratulations.” Did she not know you don’t congratulate the bride? “I hope you’ll be very happy.” What a cunt. My brother brought her over to my mother, who did her kissy-cheek thing, then held him at arms’ length as if in reverent examination. “ Look at you,” she said. “I don’t know what to say .” No shit.

The groom’s brother pulled up in a Lexus with a ski rack—he hoped he wasn’t late; the traffic was a motherfucker—and left his cashmere overcoat on the bench in the hall; he’d told us he had to get up to Bromley that evening. When the U.U. minister came in right behind him, my brother’s wife looked at her as if she’d never seen a butch lesbian before, clutched her one-year-old tighter, and the kid started to squall. Finally she had to take him upstairs, reluctant as she was to go where our bedroom might be, so we could get on with the show. Afterward, my new brother-in-law kissed me from inside his walrus mustache, clapped my husband on the shoulder and said, “You dog. Listen, gotta jet.” We took the rest of them to lunch, and after we’d gotten the baby into a booster seat and ordered drinks—Diet Cokes for the Christians—my brother said, “Would you mind?” He reached for my hand and my mother’s, his wife took my husband’s and the baby’s, my husband gave me a quick look and reached for my mother’s hand, leaving me to take the baby’s other hand, which felt soft and moist, between my thumb and forefinger. He pulled it away and began to wail as my brother said, “God our Father bless the bounty that we are about to receive in the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord amen. There, that wasn’t so tough, right? Hon, maybe you should take him and see if…” The bounty—white wine for my mother, scotch for me and the bridegroom—arrived none too soon.

When we opened the gifts, theirs turned out to be a leather-bound Bible, the New King James Version, with a page in front they’d had calligraphized with our names; lines had been ruled below for the names of offspring.

And before we leave the wedding day behind, just one final word about my little moment that morning; I don’t want to keep coming back to this as if it were some big motif, though I might be tempted to hit it one more time near the end, for the sake of symmetry. So probably every film critic in the world has already figured this out—originality has never been my strong suit, as I think we’ve seen—but in Psycho , in the shower scene, I think we’re supposed to think that Janet Leigh is making atonement for stealing that money, as well as for being a slut in a slip, which for a woman-hater like Hitchcock is really the sin, and simply washing herself clean isn’t sufficient. Only when the chocolate syrup goes swirling down the drain, and her open eye sees everything at last and yields up a tear—of contrition!—only then …et cetera et cetera. My point is, where was Mother when I needed her? To part the curtain, raise the knife and freeze me in a state of grace. Now there’s a cadence, or am I flattering myself?