Meanwhile, work continued. When I get sick or exhausted, the first thing to go is my voice. I can hold up as a dancer longer and stronger than I ever could as a singer. I was starting to get scratchy while we rehearsed in Denmark during the summer of 1995 and was full-on barking as we went on to perform in Germany, London, Italy, and Spain. Nonetheless, I loved being out promoting, finally feeling like a full-fledged member of the band. I’d worked hard to come up to speed: jazz, hip-hop, modern, lyrical—you name it, I could dance it. I felt confident and respected, and because I had such great respect for my bandmates, that meant a lot to me.
We were multitasking performances and promotion, so the last week of July, went back to LA to produce an album for someone while Sonny, Morris, and I stayed in Barcelona to do some press for the upcoming release of the New Power Generation album The Gold Experience. My love and I kept missing calls from each other because of the time difference. He finally caught up with me for a brief conversation, but he sounded sad and vacant—the way he did when he had a “migraine”—and I felt an unsettling nudge in my gut. I wished I could be there for him, mostly because he needed me, but also because I was young and insecure, and I knew there would always be someone else on hand who’d be there for him when I wasn’t.
“I wish we could talk longer,” I said. “Do you want me to tell them—”
“No, no. Go do what you need to do.”
I reluctantly hung up and went up to the rooftop patio to meet Sonny and Morris, ready to do my part on the press junket. The idea is to post up in a nice-looking location where TV crews and photographers and freelancers do short interviews one after another. The whole day was booked this way, just like the day before had been booked in another city, and the following day was booked somewhere else. Sonny and Morris are so hilarious, they made it fun, and I was good at playing The Girl, but I couldn’t shake this weird feeling.
I told Morris, “I need to go downstairs for a minute. I won’t be long.”
I just wanted to call him back and say, “I love you.” When I got to my room, the desk phone’s red message light was blinking. It was his security dude: “Hi, it’s Aaron. He wants to talk to you again. Give me a call.”
When I called back, Aaron put him on immediately, which was pretty unusual. He was never one to sit by the phone. That was my job.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He was quiet for a long time, which was not unusual at all. Sometimes he just needed to sit with that connection for a little while. I was happy to do that under normal circumstances, but I had these people waiting for me on the roof, so I said, “You know where I am, right?”
“Barcelona,” he said.
“It’s so beautiful here, and oh—they have fresh apples in the hotel lobby.”
That made him laugh for some reason.
“I want to talk to you,” I said, “but they’re waiting for me. I just came down to tell you that I love you. And I’m here for you.”
“Thank you.”
We hung up, but something kept me sitting there for an extra second or two, and it only took that long for the phone to ring. When I picked it up, there was a long pause.
And then he said, “Will you marry me?”
“Um… what?”
Probably not the response he was looking for, but I was kind of shocked. This wasn’t something we’d discussed. I loved him, and I knew he loved me. To be honest, I’d been hoping he would ask me to move in with him, but we’d never discussed that, either. I was confident we’d be together forever, but I was only twenty-two.
On the other hand…
“I said, will you marry me?”
I started crying and said, “Yes. Of course.”
“Soon.”
“Okay…”
“I want us to have a family.”
“Me too.”
“What kind of ring do you want?”
“I have no idea.”
“Where are we doing this?”
“No idea. None. Open to suggestions.”
And then came all the things you hope to tell your grandchildren someday: how we sat there for another forty minutes of tears and I love yous, and that Mama was staying in the hotel and came to my room, and we sobbed our heads off, and my makeup was beyond smeared, and that put another monkey wrench in the press thing on the roof, but who cares, because I’d never been so happy in my whole life. Absolute, optimistic, hearts-and-flowers joy. That’s what I would have told our grandchildren on a front porch somewhere in Minnesota.
Oh, I want to believe we’re out there, somewhere in the universe of all possible paths at all possible times, holding on to all that joy with a beautiful grandbaby in my arms and an acoustic guitar in his. I want to believe that this sudden proposal was because he felt a sudden rush of “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and not because he was struggling with guilt or whatever. And maybe that’s just the old insecurity talking, because if it was an impulse, the idea must have grown on him. He certainly never tried to backpedal. Quite the opposite. He couldn’t wait.