“Oh, shut up,” Olivia said.
Sometimes she longed for those few months alone in her tiny studio on Avenue A. Sometimes she missed her twinkling red heart lights, her nights sleeping with Arthur purring beside her. How could she have left her freedom behind so quickly? She and Josh had finally broken up and stayed broken up, and what did she do? She had gone and fallen for a guy because he made her body feel like it all fit together right. Like it fit together right with his body, she reminded herself.
“My mother always told me to marry at the height of your love,” David said after one of their fights. “Then you have that to keep you going in all the hard years ahead.”
“Your mother has been married three times,” Olivia said. “I don’t know if I would trust her.”
“Because she never married at the height!” He took Olivia’s hands in his and looked straight in her eyes. Whenever he did that, she felt as if he were somehow boring through her skull and reading her brain waves.
“Don’t be creepy,” she said.
“Listen. She went through the dating period, the get-to-know-you period, the living-together period, the engagement period. By the time she got married, she was already disappointed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So just because you tend to be bossy and domineering—”
“Excuse me?” Olivia said.
“And also fly off the handle over the stupidest things—”
“Like being called bossy and domineering, Mr. Disorganized? Mister Can’t Make Up His Mind? ‘I don’t know if I want the Bay Burrito or the Enchilada Embarcadero? I can’t decide. They’re both good, but I’ve been eating a lot of poultry lately—’”
“My point is, we should just get married now.”
Had that been in my brain waves? Olivia thought. She blinked hard and shook her head from side to side.
“This,” David said, satisfied, “is our height.”
“And to think all you wanted was a hat,” Olivia said as they waited in line at City Hall to get married.
“What ever happened to her?” Winnie asked. She was one of the witnesses.
Olivia felt very cranky. She and David had had an argument in the cab on the way down here and Winnie was wearing brown. “It’s the new black,” Winnie had explained. Being an editor at the women’s magazine You! made her say things like that all the time. “No,” Olivia had told her, “it’s brown.” Some wedding day, Olivia kept saying to herself.
“What was her name?” Winnie was saying. “The doctor.”
“Rachel,” David said.
“Yes. Rachel. What ever happened to her?”
This was what the fight had been about. After so many years together—seventeen gross, nine net, David liked to say—he thought he should track her down in goddamn Central America to tell her that he was getting married. Rachel, for an ex-girlfriend, was a pain in the ass. Josh, who only lived across town, stayed out of their lives. But Rachel sent them a clever computer-made change-of-address card with her head back in San Francisco and her feet lifting up and out of New York, the whole country in between strewn with clever images of her things: a stethoscope, a Jack Russell terrier, various plants. Even a Stickley chair.
“What do you want to know?” Olivia said, hearing the snap in her voice. “She keeps us posted, constantly.”
David looked pained, and Olivia found herself wondering if they were going to call the wedding off, right here in the line. Imagining it, she realized how much she wanted to go through with it. She was meant to marry David. It was that simple. The thought of packing up Arthur and moving him back to that little apartment, of living out the rest of her life without David, was so terrible that she actually gasped.
“What?” David said.
“God,” Olivia said. “I want to marry you.”
“I want to marry you, too,” he said, laughing.
“I hope so,” Winnie said. “I went all the way to midtown to borrow this dress from You! Brown is this year’s black, you know,” Winnie said, for what seemed like the hundredth time.
“So I’ve heard,” Olivia said.