“We’re married,” we kept reminding each other. “How insane is that?”
And then we’d go off giggling again. He always laughed about the fact that people often mispronounced my name like “my tie,” so when the flight attendant leaned in and said, “Mai tai?” we both cracked up laughing till we had tears in our eyes. We asked for virgin mai tais, because we were trying to get pregnant, and spent the rest of the long flight giggling, napping with our heads together, and making out under a blanket.
In the limo on the way to the hotel, my husband was doing his best to tease and distract me, but I saw a billboard over his shoulder:
Feb 16, 17, 18
“Seriously?” I said. “We’re working?”
“I figured we’d get bored and want to play.”
Lord help me, he was right. I couldn’t even be mad. Michael, Sonny, Tommy, and Morris were waiting to meet up with us at Eurasia, a nightclub in Honolulu. For the rest of the week, we were booked to play the Blaisdell Center, an arena that held about eight thousand people. We rented a boat one day, and he kept me giggling by pretending to be seasick and impersonating people and sneaking video of some guy’s janky old penny loafers. We spent an afternoon communing with dolphins at an aquarium—petting their snouts, imitating their nickering voices, letting them splash us with their tails—and that was amazing, but we didn’t really hang around the beach or do tourist stuff at all.
We did go to see a local band one evening, and my husband blew their minds by getting up and jamming with them for a while. I loved that he did that. It was very rare for him to play someone else’s guitar, because he hated using a whammy bar. He was very particular about using foot pedals and having them situated just so. I’m not sure what made him jump up and join in that night. I guess he was feeling happy and light and wide open in a way that was brand new to him.
Mostly, we spent our days the way we spent all our days on tour: sleep in as late as possible, head over to the venue for sound check, hair, makeup, warm-ups, go time. If we had any free time, one of us would nudge the other and suggest, “Let’s try to have a baby.”
The second day, my husband started saying, “I wonder if you’re pregnant.”
“Maybe.”
“I think you’re pregnant.”
“It’s possible.”
“Do you think you’re pregnant?”
“I don’t know! The only pregnant girl I ever knew dropped out of high school.”
“I need to know. We need one of those tests.”
He was going to call home and have someone FedEx us a pregnancy test, but I reminded him that they do have drugstores in Hawaii, and we now had the whole entourage in tow, so there would be someone to go get it for us without anyone knowing who it was for. This happened and the test was negative, but he thought maybe it was so early we would need a blood test. Off we went to a clinic to see a doctor. I felt like an idiot asking for the test.
“We’re newlyweds,” I told the nurse. “Pretty excited.”
“It’s too soon. You’ll have to wait just like everybody else,” she said.
When I got back to the hotel room, he sighed. “Okay. I guess we’ll keep trying.”
“Fine by me,” I said, crawling back into bed with him. This aspect of it was a joy, but honestly, if we’d had any more downtime, he would have driven me nuts with the pregnancy questions.
It ended up being the perfect honeymoon for us. Hard to imagine having more fun than we had when we were onstage together. We were doing a lot of music from The Gold Experience, including “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” which sent fans into a fit of ecstasy. We performed it the same way we’d been performing it for the past year and a half, with exacting choreography we worked out together for the World Music Awards, but it was different somehow. He kept referring to me as “my wife, Mayte.”
Ah, I thought. That’s why it feels so different. Because it is.