Amity Gaige - Schroder

Although you were the real American, I was by far more American ish . I was more spontaneous. I was more relaxed. I was still, in many ways, Eric Kennedy of Camp Ossipee, a persona for which I’d been richly rewarded at Mune College, but who, as I climbed toward thirty, was in need of an update. With you, Eric Kennedy matured. You were four years his junior, but no one would have guessed. You were prompt. You were responsible. You were deliberate. You were health conscious. You often traveled with your own baggies of gorp. You were easily offended. There was a whole list of social issues over which you took quick offense (e.g., the lack of handicap accessibility in public buildings). The mere mention of such issues made your cheeks red. You were always ready for polite but tense debate. It was as if throughout the course of your life, you had been traumatized by chronic misunderstandings.

How quickly I dropped all other commitments, all other friendships, clubs, and interests. I had a sense of loving you, despite your youth, as if I were your student, and therefore whatever you did — however obscure, however specific — was, to me, the right thing. You had such a careful way with the truth. You wanted everything you said to be true on several different levels. It took you a long time to fill out simple forms in a doctor’s office, tapping the pen to your lips. Did you exercise daily or weekly? Well, you exercised several days a week but not daily . I leaned over your shoulder to help you scrutinize whatever bit of inconsequentia was capturing your attention. I was happy to study bar codes and ingredients and all genres of fine print with you. The grocery store, the DMV. In America, the opportunities to be accurate are endless. And nothing escaped your eye. Nothing, of course, except me.

Marriage. The clashing of expectations produces a new chord. We had a small civil ceremony. A honeymoon in Virginia Beach. And after these rituals, there was the renting of the apartment, and the rearranging of furniture, and then an idleness descended upon us, and we were like any newly married pair, nervously wondering, OK, what next? How should we go forward? For a while, there seemed to be someone missing — someone else , like a leader, or a chief. An urgently needed third party whose role it was to direct traffic between us, to negotiate conflicting plans, forge compromises, translate cultural or religious differences. Or were we really supposed to go it alone? Us? The bride — you — struggling to outstretch her parochial upbringing, born as she was to slightly ignorant but good-hearted Catholics from Delmar, New York. And the groom — me — raised in a (completely fictional) town on Cape Cod he called Twelve Hills, a “stone’s throw from Hyannis Port,” a treasured only child, endowed with a last name that could only be uttered in rapture.

For the record: The groom never told the bride that he was related to the Kennedys of presidential fame. This has been reported in the papers, and the groom categorically denies it. No, it was simply the word “Kennedy” plus the words “near Hyannis Port,” and everyone started rushing to conclusions. The groom will admit that once or twice late at night with his female peers at Mune College, he did not sufficiently debunk the rumor of himself as a second cousin twice removed to the Hyannis Port Kennedys. And he does not deny that the name often greased the gears of bureaucracy, making what would otherwise have been dull encounters with bank loan officers, traffic cops, etc., slightly charged , even when he denied any family connection.

The bride, however, never seemed much interested in the groom as a “Kennedy.” If the bride was impressed by the name, that day they met in Washington Park and all the days thereafter, she never talked about it. The bride was a serious and moral woman, not easily wowed. She was also a woman who acquired (by the way), in the period of years in which the groom loved her, an incredible, inflationary beauty, and the groom just wants to mention that here and to put it here in words in case either of them forgets it. The truth is, she stunned the groom whenever he saw her. I mean whenever he saw her. Just the simple fact of her. Whenever she came into one room from another room. For example, stepping out of the kitchenette in Pine Hills with a plate of scrambled eggs. The groom was in love with her. That was no lie. And when he was in love with her, a minute no longer seemed like the means to an hour. Rather, each minute was an end in itself, a stillness with vague circularity, a gently suggested territory in which to be alive. This trick that love did with minutes endowed hours and days with a kind of transcendent wishy-washiness that encouraged an utter lack of ambition in the groom and was the closest thing he had ever felt to true joy, to true relief, and he still wonders what would have happened if they could have kept up with it, if they could have stayed in love like that, if maybe they could have crawled through a wormhole to a place where their love could find permanence. Because in the end, the great warring forces of our existence are not life versus death (the groom has come to believe), but rather love versus time . In the majority, love does not survive time’s passage. But sometimes it does. It must, sometimes.

Anyway. Soon after his wedding, the groom became a real estate agent, but not by his own choice. It wasn’t a bad choice. It just wasn’t his. The bride’s father had started to bug the couple about the groom’s future plans. He suspected that the groom made little money as a medical translator and even less on his “independent research” (see here). The bride resented this intrusion on the part of her father. She did not think the groom needed to conventionalize his lifestyle. She liked the idea of him at home, deep in thought, and she liked finding him sitting in the same place she’d left him when she returned from her teacher training. In fact, the bride maintained that if the groom abandoned his research, he would be selling out . He would be selling out his dreams, which deserved a chance. In retrospect, it seems that the groom was an exemplar of the kind of suicidal integrity toward which the bride liked to encourage her middle schoolers.

So the bride told her father to back off . She told her father that the groom’s independent research would come together. The bride told her father that her groom was working very hard, that he might even be a visionary , a term that must have alarmed her father, visions sounding an awful lot like hallucinations .

Still, the man was her father. He remained concerned. Soon after the pair returned from their honeymoon, the father-in-law came over for a tête-à-tête. The groom remembers this interview very well. The father-in-law — let’s call him Hank, because that’s his name — sat across from the groom on their used sofa in Pine Hills, knees cracking arthritically, and the two of them spoke at length about the number of automotive accidents occurring on a low salt stretch of Hackett Boulevard, before they fell into an awkward and loaded silence. 2

“Eric,” Hank finally said. “I’m not sure how to say what I want to say, so instead I’m going to tell you a story.”

The story was about Hank as a young man of twenty. The story was about how, back in Troy, New York, when Hank first married his then-slender wife, he had been lectured by his own father-in-law in an apartment not unlike this one. In the story, Hank had to sit and listen to his father-in-law drone on about responsibility and the future and savings and the importance of being heavily insured, adding such stress into the mind of young Hank that he almost wanted to take the whole thing back, the whole marriage. He swore to God that he would never be like that. He would never pressure his own future son-in-law. Because a newly married man, Hank said, was like the captain of a rudderless ship. Out there, at sea, with no compass, no stars, no crew, no sight of land. But in the end — and this was the story’s moral — young Hank had followed his father-in-law’s instructions, albeit with a lot of resentment, and only after the old man passed away did Hank understand that he had been right about things, and that maybe he’d even loved Hank. Hank missed him sometimes, this unasked-for father, on certain bracing winter mornings.