Let's Pretend This Never Happened (14 page)

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.

And then I turned around and Victor had silently opened my car door and was kneeling and holding a diamond ring so small that I knew he had actually bought it himself. And so I said yes, partly because I loved him, partly out of relief that I was not going to be murdered, and partly because I knew he’d never let me out of the car to pee until I agreed to marry him. And then I kissed him and still he stayed knelt down, blocking my exit. And then I asked him if I could go to the bathroom, and he gave me this pained expression, and I wondered whether I’d fucked up his romantic moment, but then he straightened up and I noticed that he’d accidentally knelt right in a pile of broken glass, which was awesome, because there’s nothing more romantic than a proposal that ends with you needing a tetanus shot.

I remember thinking at the time that if I didn’t have to pee so badly I probably would have told him that we should wait, because truthfully, I knew I was a little too broken to be married to anyone. But by the time I’d gotten out of the bathroom he’d called everyone we knew and told them I said yes.

I tried to convince Victor several times that he’d made a terrible mistake in proposing, but whenever I insisted that he would be better off with one of his old debutantes, he dismissed it as low self-esteem. Even when I assured him I was kind of insane, he brushed it off as an exaggeration on my part, because he’d witnessed my minor panic attacks and occasional breakdowns and he wrongly assumed that was as bad as it got.

Then one morning, shortly after we got engaged, I woke up as Victor reached over for me, and he stopped suddenly and slowly sat up. In a carefully measured voice he said, “Honey . . . ? Did you . . . did you pee in the bed?”

And I was all, “WHAT?! Of course I didn’t pee in the bed!” And then I thought, “
Ew, DID
I pee in the bed?” and I felt around and I didn’t feel anything, but then I saw this large puddle seeping slowly though the top of the comforter into the valley between Victor and me. Then I screamed,
“
OHMYGOD,
CAT PEE!” and I threw the comforter off me and the cat pee splashed everywhere.

Victor jumped out of bed, gagging and shouting profanities at both me and the cat, and then I realized that—in spite of his
total disgust
in thinking that I had peed on him—he had still struggled to maintain a calm and understanding demeanor. Because apparently he thought I was just crazy enough to
randomly urinate on him
. And that’s when I thought that
just maybe
we had a chance together.

Still, I felt sorry for Victor, because he did know that I was
kind of
mentally ill, but he also thought I was naturally thin, so he was kind of expecting “crazy,” but I think he was expecting hot, sexy crazy. Then Victor insisted I start seeing the college shrink, who coaxed me away from the anorexia, and I immediately gained thirty pounds, which was very healthy, but which seemed
not hot at all
. Also, I suddenly started eating solid food, so I cost a lot more than Victor had originally expected. Basically he got a really shitty deal.

And I was even crazier than I’d let on.

It Wasn’t Stew

It’s always seemed unfair to me that I’d had so little time to ingratiate myself with my soon-to-be in-laws, whereas Victor had a year to worm his way into my parents’ hearts before we got married.

Granted, it hadn’t been easy for any of us. One of the first times he’d come to my house for dinner, we were sitting in the living room visiting with my mom. My mom and I were on the couch, and from our vantage point, we could see my father tiptoeing into the room. He gestured with a finger to his lips not to let Victor know that he was behind him and a live bobcat was tucked under his right arm. This probably would have been my exact worst nightmare of bringing a boy home to meet my parents, if I’d ever had enough creativity to imagine my father throwing a live bobcat on the boy I was trying to impress. I assumed that Daddy had accidentally left a bobcat in the house, fallen asleep, realized his terrible mistake when he woke up and heard Victor’s voice, and was now surreptitiously sneaking it out the back door so that Victor would never suspect that we were the type of family to keep live bobcats in the house. Unfortunately, that was not my father’s intent at all, and my eyes widened in horror as my father leaned over and yelled in his booming, cheerful voice,
“HELLOOOO, VICTOR,”
while tossing a live bobcat on him.

Most people reading this will assume that this was my father’s way of making would-be suitors terrified of him so they would always treat his daughters right, but this wasn’t even vaguely a concern of his. He would just as happily have tossed the live bobcat on my mother or me, if it weren’t for the fact that we’d all become superhumanly aware of the terrifying sounds of my father trying to be quiet. In my father’s defense, it was a smallish sort of bobcat that my dad was nursing back to health so he could release it back into the wild, rather than one of the full-grown ones from the backyard. At the time, my dad had several large bobcats he was keeping, but they were seldom indoors, and if my mom found one in the house she’d shoo it into the bobcat cages outside with a broom. I once asked my mom exactly
why
Daddy kept bobcats, and she said it was because “he collects their urine.” Because,
yeah.
Whose father
doesn’t
have some sort of a collection? (Also, for those of you not from bobcat territory, bobcats are like small, easily underestimated tigers. They’ll avoid confrontation if they can, but push them too far and they’ll cheerfully eat your face off. They’re like tiny, undermedicated badgers and should be avoided.)

Even if I
had
ever wondered how Victor would respond to a giant bearded man throwing a live bobcat on him, I don’t think I ever could have foreseen his actual reaction. Victor’s jaw clenched and he stiffened, staring with wide-eyed shock at the bobcat and remaining perfectly still. Then (impressively avoiding any sudden movements) he looked up at my father in bewilderment. Perhaps Victor was expecting to see a look of embarrassment from my father, who must’ve
accidentally
spilled a bobcat on him, or perhaps he thought my father would be just as horrified and shocked to see a bobcat on Victor’s lap, and would tell him to remain still while he got the tranquilizer gun. Instead, my dad smiled broadly and held out his hand to shake Victor’s, as if an unexpected bobcat weren’t sitting on Victor’s chair. (A bobcat, I might add, who was looking just as horrified and pissed off himself at being placed in this awkward social situation.) Victor kept a wary eye on the bobcat (who was now making the frightening sort of
noises bobcats make when they want to make it perfectly clear that they are
not
house cats and don’t want you to snuggle them), and then Victor glanced at me, as if deciding whether or not I was worth this. He took a deep breath, and then turned in slow motion in his seat to shake my dad’s hand. “Henry,” he said tersely, nodding his head in greeting, the fear in his voice showing only slightly. Then he turned back to my mom and kept talking as if nothing could be more natural. It was awesome, and I think it earned the respect of all of us right that moment. Even the bobcat seemed to realize he was probably safer with Victor than with the large man who was always throwing him on people, and snuggled down beside Victor to glare resentfully at the rest of us.

(Disclaimer: These aren’t great pictures of Victor or of the bobcats.)

Later Victor told me he’d been totally freaked out by the situation, but that his dad had once owned a cougar named Sonny when Victor was a kid, so he assured me that he understood that some people liked exotic pets. And it was nice that we had this thing in common to bring us together, but the difference was that
his
father owned helicopters, Porsches, and pet cougars because he was wealthy and ostentatious, and
my
father kept wild bobcats for their urine. I didn’t point out those differences, though, because we were bonding. And because I still couldn’t completely explain the urine thing myself, although I was later told it’s simply an organic way some people use to frighten pests out of their yards. Unless those pests are bobcats, I guess. Then you’re fucked.

For some reason, Victor was very concerned about what my parents thought about him, and he focused on winning their approval. He’d won over my mom almost instantly by helping her rebuild an old muscle car, but my father always treated him as if I’d inexplicably invited our CPA over for dinner. If we’d ever had a CPA, that is. Victor attempted to woo my father’s approval as a
manly man
by asking my dad to teach him about his taxidermy business. It was an endeavor that neither of them seemed entirely excited about, but they both pretended to be happy to do it for my sake, in spite of the fact that I told them both I thought it was a terrible idea. At the end of what would be Victor’s first (and only) day of taxidermy, he looked physically ill, and my father looked bewildered.

“What happened?” I whispered to Victor as my father went to go lie down. “Did you throw up? Because
almost everyone
throws up the first time they mount something,” I reassured him. “I’m pretty sure that’s normal.”

“No,” Victor answered, his arm slung over his eyes as if attempting to block out the images. “No, your dad had already mounted it. It just needed some touchups. It was a black boar, and he told me I could paint the inside of the mouth, because that’s good, quick beginner’s work.” It
was
, actually, and I gave my dad points for giving him something easy and nongross.

“And?” I asked.

“I spent six hours painting it.
Six hours.
With an airbrush.”

“
Wow.
That’s . . . that’s a
really
long time to paint a boar mouth. How did it turn out?”

“It looked like . . .” He paused for a moment, staring grimly at the ceiling. “You know when Fred Flintstone dresses up like a girl?”

“Oh.”
I bit my bottom lip to remain stoic, because I knew that laughing would just add insult to
injury
more insult, and I patted his arm reassuringly. “So, what did Daddy say?” I asked cautiously.

“He didn’t say anything. He just looked at the boar in silence and then led me away from it. I’ve never heard him so quiet. Then he asked me to string his hunting bow for him, and I almost got a hernia doing it. He took me out back to try to shoot it, and I almost shot myself in the leg. For real.
I almost shot myself. In the leg.
I think your dad was expecting me to kill myself accidentally so that he could tell you there had been a tragic accident, and then you could just move on with your life and find someone else who doesn’t make wild boars look like cheap male prostitutes.”

I tried to convince Victor that my dad actually adored him, but then I remembered that two weeks earlier my dad had tried to teach Victor flint napping (the art of making arrowheads out of rocks the Native American way), and Victor had been doing surprisingly well, until he cut himself and had bled so much we started to suspect he’d hit an artery.
“You sure you want to marry a hemophiliac?”
my dad had whispered to me while looking for something to use as a tourniquet. “That’s a hereditary trait, you know.” It was possible my father
was
trying to kill him.

In a final desperate attempt, Victor decided to make a present for my father of an authentic Native American medicine bag he’d made himself with a found coyote face, a dead turtle, and some braided leather for the strap. When he’d finished his macabre handicraft project he held it up to me triumphantly, and I stared at the eyeless coyote face for a moment, and then went back to reading my book.
“Isn’t this awesome?”
he insisted (somewhat manically), and I shrugged halfheartedly, allowing that it
did
seem like the sort of the thing that my father would enjoy. This wasn’t saying much, though, since my father also inexplicably enjoyed picking up interesting roadkill, and creating mythical taxidermied creatures out of spare parts. Victor was pissed that I didn’t share his enthusiasm, and he gruffly and dismissively waved me off, pointing out that I was “a girl,” and thus couldn’t understand such masculine endeavors as winning over your future bride’s father with such a manly gift.