Marry-go-round

Bride to Be, Norman Rockwell

      When Brandy heard that the Morgans, the incompatible couple with two children who had fought next door like cats and dogs for two years had finally separated and were getting divorced, she reflected, and not for the first time, that marriage was the Auschwitz of our age. “We’re prisoners not of Nazis but of ourselves,” she told Mark, the divorced divorce lawyer who had handled her second divorce and who also was Jewish. They lived not far from each other in a northern New Jersey town that was just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, which was just a fifteen minute drive away over the George Washington Bridge. As she had told Mark about marriage when they had gotten to know each other better, “No institution is better constituted to make bitter enemies of people who had previously been, if not madly in love, at least had been infatuated enough to get married.”

      Brandy had been miserably almost suicidedly married twice, but she had had sexual relationships with a half dozen men when she was separated from her first husband. Collectively those men had helped reveal to her what she had come to think of as the horrors of heterosexuality. Her mother, who had divorced her father when Brandy was three, was one of the forty-nine women who had helped establish the National Organization for Women. Brandy was not a card carrying feminist, but she was proud of and had loved her mother who had died of breast cancer at the age of fifty-five. On her deathbed, her mother, heavily drugged, had asked her to promise she would never marry again. Brandy had promised but only because her mother was not in her right mind. Brandy had not wanted to make the promise because she was sure she would never marry again anyway and didn’t want to think she needed a promise to prevent her from again tying what she called, with her genetic linguistic divagation, “the naught that binds.”

      She and Mark had an all-holds-barred relationship, which she had never had with any man before. They had become close friends but there was an almost incest taboo against their developing not only a sexual but even a slightly romantic relationship. Brandy did not have a brother, but if she had had she was fairly sure he and she would have the kind of feelings for each other that she and Mark shared. Very personal but platonic. Mark had joint custody of a daughter, Arden, who was the same age as Brandy’s daughter Melanie. Arden and Melanie were like loving sisters, and Brandy envied them for that, for she had neither a brother or sister. Being an only child was a cross she had borne stoically, unwilling to admit until she was an adult just how much she missed not having a sister.

      Brandy and Mark were frequently able to drop Melanie or Arden off at the other’s house when something came up, Brandy having a nanny and Mark a spinster aunt both of whom welcomed the girls getting together because they loved sleeping under the same roof and in the same bedroom with each other, which ever house it happened to be.

      Brandy’s first marriage had been childless. She had married someone she had met at the Harvard Business School, where they were both studying for an MBA, but he was a WASP from an old New England family and she a Jew whose maternal grandfather had been a scrap dealer on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Could any union have made less sense? Could any couple have had less in common? She liked martinis. He was a teetotaler. Her MBA was from Harvard. His law degree was from Yale. She was a liberal Democrat. He was a conservative Republican.

      “How unqualified people are to make one of the three or four most important decisions of their lives,” Mark had said, shaking his head the first time Brandy had consulted him professionally.

      “Isn’t that the truth?” she had admitted, embarrassed to have fallen back, an Ivy League MBA, on a banal platitude on an occasion that called for, even cried out for, deeply felt originality of expression. “My god!” she thought to herself. “How trite.” So she had added, somewhat desperately, in an attempt to make up for her platitude, “They make one of the three or more most important decisions of their lives not just once, not just twice, but over and over again, as if they were Hollywood stars.”

      “Yes, Hollywood stars,” Mark had agreed, banally embracing her platitudinousness, pouring more fast-drying cement around their feet, showing Harvard Law had not been completely successful anymore than Yale Business School had in flushing out the verbal sediment that accumulates in the reservoir of human inarticulateness. Municipal fire departments periodically allow for as long as eight hours the water from opened hydrants to gush forth like miniature Niagaras down gutters and sewers, flushing the sediment that accumulates in water lines. If there were some comparable ability in human beings to periodically babble nonsensically, like zealots speaking in tongues, then the world might be linguistically less of a cul de sac.

      “Mommy,” Melanie had said to her mother out of the blue one day, “Why don’t you and Mark get married?” It took Brandy a minute or so of hemming and hawing before she regained her composure.

      “Me and Mark get Married, dear?” she answered. “Whatever put that idea into your head?”

      “Arden asked me yesterday,” Melanie said. “I told her I didn’t know but I would ask you.”

      “Why Mark and I don’t get married?”

      “Yes,” Melanie said.

      “Melanie, I’ve already been married twice,” Brandy said, wishing she could utilize her Auschwitz metaphor to convey the suffering she had experienced in her two marriages, but that was the last thing she ever wanted to try to explain to the person she loved more than she had ever loved anybody, particularly infinitely more than she had ever loved her two ex-husbands.

      “Arden thinks it doesn’t make sense for us all to be living in different houses,” Melanie said.

      “Hmm,” was all Brandy said, wondering what might have prompted Arden to ask Melanie the question in the first place. “Did Arden say she had asked her father the same question?”

      “No, she didn’t say,” Melanie said. “But do you think he’s thinking about asking you to marry him?”

      “No,” Brandy said. “Of course not. We’re just good friends. The way you and Melanie are good friends.”

      “I almost forgot,” Melanie added. “Arden wants to know if she can sleep over tonight.”

      “Has she asked her father?”

      “No. She wants to make sure it’s OK with you first.”

      “But she slept over the night before last,” Brandy pointed out.

      “That seems like a long time ago,” Melanie said. And then she asked, “What are we having for supper Mommy?”

      For twenty-four hours Brandy debated whether she should telephone Mark and arrange to see him. While she was debating, Mark called her. He wondered whether they could get together for a talk. She readily agreed they could. They decided to meet at the reservoir on the outskirts of the town. There was a path around the reservoir, which was a favorite rondezvous for spooning young lovers, but during the day the path was usually unoccupied. On their first time around the reservoir, Mark talked idly and did not say what he had wanted to talk to her about. Instead, he had stroked his rabbinical kind of beard more than was customary.

      As they began their second time around the reservoir, Brandy asked him if there was something he wanted to talk to her about.

      “There certainly is, Brandy.” They stopped walking and he stared at the reservoir, avoiding looking at her. When he finally looked at her, directly in her eyes, he said, “Brandy, I’m thinking of asking someone to marry me.”

      “Oh, my god!” she thought. “This cannot be!” Couldn’t a divorce lawyer handle a marriage proposal any better than this? It was like a crack auto mechanic chronically forgetting to change the oil in his Audi Avant. They silently resumed their second walk around the reservoir. Her mind was racing. Her heart was pounding. A pregnant teenage girl had drowned in the reservoir several years before. At first the police had suspected foul play, but then had decided it was probably suicide, though they released a statement saying why she had downed was still under investigation. Brandy now thought of the drowned girl, thought of her committing suicide because she was pregnant and not married.

      “I wish I was handling this better,” Mark told her after another long silence in which they were coming to the end of their second circling of the reservoir.

      “What’s preventing you from just asking her?” Brandy asked, finding it hard to continue to speak of herself in the third person and failing to hide the feeling of impatience and even contempt that she felt for Mark at the moment.

      “Because she’s one of my patients,” Mark said. “She just got divorced.”

      “She?” Brandy stammered. “She? You mean it’s not me?”

      “You?” Mark asked, confounded, looking down at this patent leather shoes, as if staring at his own red-faced reflection.

      “I thought,” she said, trying desperately to extricate herself from this humiliating situation. “I thought you . . .” She fell speechless as they began their third go-around of the reservoir, which she now realized was more of an oval than a circle. “That’s it,” she said aloud, in a sort of free association, “I’m just an old eccentric.”

      Mark put his arms around her to comfort her. “Brandy! Brandy!” he said, crying along with her. “It wasn’t you I was thinking of asking to marry me.”

      “Of course not,” she blubbered disconsolately, acknowledging bitterly to herself that if Mark had proposed she probably would have accepted. For that she felt she could never forgive herself. Never!