“You love me a lot,” I said to him one Saturday morning in early October when we were still in bed. “But I love you more than you love me.”
He laughed and denied it, but I said it again, for I knew I was right. It was the sort of statement that might, if spoken within my earshot by one of the office girls, have caused me to grimace and retreat to my desk and shake my head at the varieties of silliness to which modern womanhood subjected itself. But now the concern seemed reasonable and necessary: Who loved whom more? How much of myself I could expect to lose?
We’d have a breakfast of toast and ginger ale, coffee and tea, and go back to bed, and then out again, for lunch down the street. Hungry from exertion. We’d be so tired in those days from staying up late, but I didn’t mind. Sleep no longer rated.
His laugh was a merry roar, and his sartorial excellence was unmatched. Later, much later, after we’d been married for a time, I’d even come to like the cool, astringent style with which he put me in my place during fights.
We found we traveled well together when we took a late-autumn weekend in the country, in Maine: a rural dell well full of truculent birds, a rented farmhouse. Fresh and tasty lungsful of air. I was not much of a bird-watcher, though I did prize the simple birds I could recognize: doves, sparrows. Max knew them all, both by call and by plumage.
And that is how we passed those months.
Then, just after the New Year, January of 1935, when I’d returned from a holiday visit to my family in D.C., Max came over to my apartment and proposed.
Tallulah rubbed her auburn cat head against his ankle territorially as he went down on one knee.
“From 1935 on, Lils,” he said. “If you say yes, this’ll be my happiest New Year. I don’t want another twelve months to go by where I’m not married to you.”
I said yes without question and felt stupid with happiness.
*
Once our engagement was announced, of course, others did question it, so at odds was this turn of events with my heretofore strident bachelor-girl pride.
Why, the papers asked, why would I get married when I stood alone as the undisputed queen of the world—for even then Manhattan had taken to calling itself “the world”—when all impediments had been removed, and everything was wonderful?
“Sneerer at Love Engaged to Wed,” said the headline in the New York World-Telegram, followed by the subhead, “Lillian Boxfish, Poet, to Marry Rug Buyer.” The lede read, “Man bites dog—or, even more incredible, love bites Lillian Boxfish. The young lady who writes books of verses putting the sneer on the tender emotion has got herself engaged. Miss Boxfish has another set of poems all ready for publication. It should be titled Eating My Words.”
Truth be told, I had branded myself as the scoffer at love—but the expectation that I scoff vocally at love every time some society-page scribbler buttonholed me at a function had grown oppressive. As had trying to explain that the love I scoffed at was not the genuine article—the visceral and untidy relations between adult humans—but rather the flat simulacrum thereof deployed by advertisers less imaginative than I to sell things that nobody needs. Worst of all was a suspicion, one I could neither dismiss nor explain, that my scoffing had done nothing to check the stupid sentimentality that it took as its target, but had actually strengthened it somehow, amounting in the public eye to a few rounds of witty banter prior to the taming of the shrew. I had been typecast in a bad role; my best option was to break character. Paradoxically, I figured, I would be more free to live and work and write the way I chose if I did so while married to someone I truly loved.
For I truly loved Max. And I would continue to do so for decades, even after we were no longer a couple.
The spring leading up to our wedding, the spring of 1935, proved that the life of a self-styled poet sophisticate and crack ad copywriter about to marry is not a tranquil one.
There was the telephone jangling all day with queries from friends who wanted to know “What about that sunny spinster’s life now?”
Even Helen, though supportive, was stunned when I told her. She kidded around, throwing a hand to her lovely high forehead, pretending to feel faint and asking for a chair to collapse in as she absorbed the shock.
I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, actually—no one in the press, that is—but Helen wisely persuaded me to give some interviews, if only because the society columnists were going to go crazy at the news regardless.