IT WAS 1996, and Victor and I were still in college. At night he worked as a deejay, and I worked as a phone prostitute in telemarketing. We’d been living together for about a year when Victor decided it was time to get married, and (just to make it all rock-star romantic) he decided to propose on air. The only problem was that if he was on air he wouldn’t be there to physically make me say yes, and so instead he took the night off and set up a recording that would make it sound like he was calling in to the radio show to talk to the guy filling in for him. He planned on my hearing the proposal on air, and then getting down on one knee and handing me the ring, but he had no idea how to get me in front of the radio, so he suggested we go for a drive so he could listen to his substitute on the radio. And so we did. For six. Fucking. Hours.
6:00 P.M.—We’ve already been in the car for a half-hour. I’m getting hungry.
6:30 P.M.—I’m hungry, but Victor refuses to pull over to eat.
7:00 P.M.—Victor is acting very strange and jumpy. I start to suspect he’s going to kill me. I know this seems like an illogical jump to make, since this was the same man who cried when he punched me in the nose over a potato chip, but I’d always suspected that Victor was a little too good to be true, and it seemed easier to believe that he wanted to murder me than it was to believe he’d want to marry me.
7:30 P.M.—I pretend I’m going to pass out if he doesn’t take me to get something to eat. Victor is convinced that the moment I leave the car, his sub will play the recording, so he insists we just go through the drive-thru of Taco Bell.
8:00 P.M.—Victor refuses to turn down the radio while we’re ordering our burritos. I assume he wants to drown out my voice in case I ask the cashier to call 911.
8:30–10:30 P.M.—Victor drives in circles. I have to pee. Victor will not let me out of the car. He’s sweating a lot. I dimly wonder where he’ll dump my body.
10:30–11:30 P.M.—The urge to go to the bathroom has now grown more pressing than the urge to escape. I begin to suspect that Victor is trying to kill me by making my bladder explode. He smiles nervously and I wonder whether I could make myself pee on myself.
11:40 P.M.—No, but not for lack of trying.
11:45 P.M.—Fifteen minutes to the end of the sub’s shift. Victor is a wreck. I’m at that point of having to pee where you think you’re going to throw up, but then you realize as soon as you throw up you’re going to pee on yourself anyway, and I start considering leaping out of the moving car, because even if I peed on myself, the coroner wouldn’t judge me, because who wouldn’t pee on themselves when they were tossing themselves out of a moving car? Nobody, that’s who.
MIDNIGHT—Victor sighed and turned into the parking lot of our apartment building, and he just stared numbly at the dumpster in front of us, looking defeated and despondent, and that’s when I felt really, really bad for him. I put my hand on his arm and he sighed miserably, like he was a total failure. I wanted to cheer him up, but it felt weird wanting to cheer up someone who was possibly depressed because they didn’t murder you correctly, and that’s when I thought, “This must be what love is. When you want to make it less difficult for someone to murder you.” And that’s when I realized that I was far too in love with him for my own good, and also that I probably needed therapy.
It was also when I noticed that he’d suddenly tensed up, and that his own voice was on the radio. And then I thought that I was definitely going to get murdered, because this was the perfect alibi, since it would sound like he was in the radio studio when they found my body. But then I noticed he was looking at me and grinning crookedly, and I listened to the Victor on the radio talk to the other deejay about a girl he’d met and fallen in love with, and how at the end of every shift he’d played Sting’s “When We Dance” as his signoff, and as a silent “I love you” to that girl. And then he said that he’d grown so in love with her that he was going to propose to her right then. On the fucking radio.