A Cup of Comfort for Couples (30 page)

“I am so glad I spoke to you; you really know women,” Steve said.

I went back into the house and studied a number of things that Eric had given me for birthdays and anniversaries. Perfumes named after famous stars in weirdshaped bottles, a book about Tom Cruise, and three different earring and pendant sets in my favorite colors of red and purple. I smiled as a plan came to me.

The next day I casually said to my husband, “I am going along to Donna's church sale. I have a number of nice things I can donate.”

“What kind of things?” Eric asked.

“Oh, perfumes; I can never go through them all. And some books I have read. And some of my jewelry; I can only wear so much. We don't go out much these days, so I don't have the same call for these things.”

I could see Eric visibly taking stock; that ruled out three of his first choices for my upcoming birthday.

On my birthday morning, I went down to breakfast, prepared by Eric, who was waiting for me at the table. I found a card sitting at my place and next to it another little envelope tied up with red ribbon. I opened the smaller envelope carefully. It read: “Confirmation of dinner for two at The Old Castle Restaurant.”

I looked up at Eric, eagerly watching me. I beamed at him. Old Castle was the best restaurant in the whole area, small and romantic, with a coal fire burning in the corner and candles on the table. “It's fantastic! What on earth made you think of that?” I asked him.

“Oh, well, I thought it would give you a chance to wear your fancy perfumes and your jewelry,” he said. “I'm not daft; I recognize a hint when I get one.”

As I got up and went into his arms to hug him, I smiled to myself. It was never meant as a hint to go out somewhere, but I'd never tell him that.

His views on women probably had some truth in them; it was the all-knowing tone that had annoyed me. On the other hand, I knew that Eric did not particularly like having meals out; he just wanted to please me. He had missed out on the most important point for Steve: Everything he gave me was out of love, and that's what made the gifts special. That's what made me love him so much.

—
Joyce Stark

The First Thing about Love

“L
ove? . . . She didn't know the first thing about love!”

This scornful verdict from Ira, in the novel
Breathing Lessons
, by Anne Tyler, is aimed at his son Jesse and at Fiona, the teenage mother of Jesse's child. Ira's timid wife, Maggie, would love nothing more than to see her son happily married, and she desperately wants a relationship with her granddaughter. She contends that Jesse and Fiona still love each other and that love can prevail over their messy history. Ira's contemptuous response leaves Maggie perplexed.

She asks hesitantly, “What is the first thing about love?”

Good question. In its early stages, my relationship with the love of my life certainly appeared less than promising.

We met during a training session for a theater company in Los Angeles, California. I had been in a rehearsal until 4:00 a.m. and was comatose on the floor of a classroom. That is, until I was rudely awakened at the crack of dawn by the sound of some completely insensitive, and apparently blind, Canadian hick singing a twangy folk song at the top of his lungs and strumming his guitar with great gusto.

Hello
? I thought.
Can this moron not see that
I'm
sleeping here
?

That was our introduction. If someone would have told me then that this would be the man I would marry and with whom I would create two amazing little individuals, I probably would have asked them to suffocate me with my own pillow then and there. For one thing, at that first meeting, I was wearing a large diamond ring from someone else. Someone different, very different, from Calvin.

Michael, my fiancé at the time, was in medical school. Let me just say now that the qualities that make a great doctor aren't always as appealing in a romantic partner. I've always believed that a man's closet defines him. Michael's closet was a three-sided walk-in affair. The left side was all shirts, from his most casual T-shirt to his most highly starched and properly labeled dress shirt, all on brown plastic hangers arranged in a precise order, one inch apart. Straight ahead were pants — jeans to khakis to suit trousers — all stiffly creased, also on brown plastic hangers, exactly one inch apart. Jackets were to the right. Shoes were on the floor in plastic boxes, computer labeled, and in order from athletic shoes to dress shoes.

I once left a wet towel on the floor at Michael's apartment for a minute or two while I dried my hair, and the incident nearly became a deal-breaker. I once helped him hang a Van Gogh print over his dresser. It took us an hour and a half, the use of two tape measures and a level, and the need to rearrange the two items on the dresser sixty-four times to create the right visual effect. I'm actually surprised that Michael liked Van Gogh, Vincent being such an artistically and emotionally messy guy.

Calvin's closet was . . . well, not even a closet. It was a suitcase. A suitcase from Goodwill with a broken handle held on by duct tape. Inside the suitcase were holey underwear, a couple of T-shirts with the sleeves cut off and printed with some slogan about pickin' and grinnin', and a brown double knit polyester suit, also from Goodwill. His other possessions consisted of a fringed suede jacket, a sleeve garter from which the fabric had disintegrated, a worn Bible, and a guitar named Spanky. He made the curious fashion statement of wearing the sleeve garter with his sleeveless T-shirts.

Out of the more than 150 teams assembled for five-month performance tours to various regions of North America, Calvin and I ended up assigned to the same one. A married couple led our team, which also included another single woman, Gigi. We headed off to wow the Midwest with our dramatic and musical talents, which pleased me greatly since Michael was in his second year of medical school in Illinois.

About two seconds into the tour, Gigi fell madly in love with Calvin. We later learned that this was a habit of hers toward anyone with testosterone and breath in his lungs; actually, breathing was optional. We were all somewhat grateful that she fell for Calvin instead of Lanin, since Lanin was married to Jeannie. But it made things only slightly less complicated because, although I didn't know it then, Calvin promptly fell in love with me. And I, naturally, was in love with Michael. If we could've convinced Michael to fall in love with Gigi, we would've had the perfect square. I know Gigi would've been game.

When I remember that tour, I often picture myself as Rose, in the movie
Titanic
, faced with the choice between the neurotic control freak and the freespirited drifter. I would get off the phone after a late-night argument with Michael, and there would be Calvin, ready to listen and tell me I'm wonderful and oh-so-misunderstood. There he would be, charming everyone with his guitar, or running everywhere with the eagerness of a puppy, or dropping everything to skip rocks with a five-year-old playmate.

So I — like Rose — returned the big diamond from whence it came and chose the free-spirited drifter in the end.

It took three years to come to that end, during which I went to tour with a performance troupe in Europe, running away from the whole confusing situation. Calvin, undeterred by distance, wrote to me every single day — 365 letters. My troupe would arrive at our weekly mail drops, and there would be a mound of letters, all for me. This did not make me particularly popular with the rest of my team, but Calvin's unconditional faithfulness did impress my team leader. She pulled strings to have him sent to Europe. We've often joked that he wore me down with sheer, annoying persistence. In truth, every heart longs to be relentlessly pursued. No one can resist it.

Touring together again, we ended up one afternoon on a mountaintop in Spain. We had crossed the border from France to renew our tourist visas. As we stood gazing over the breathtaking expanse, Calvin got down on one knee and asked me to become his bride. He has since joked that he threatened to jump if I said no, and I have since joked that he threatened to push me off if I said no. There were no actual threats involved. He was my very best friend and my most adventurous playmate. I — again, like
Titanic
's Rose — was swept away by his beautiful love of life.

Fortunately, unlike Rose's paramour, my rambling, gambling drifter didn't disappear under the waves after a single night of passion. He also lived. And as the song goes, our love went on and on. Long enough for that lack of tidiness and fashion sense to become annoying, for worries about health insurance and mortgages to overshadow the appeal of a free spirit, and for passion to fizzle. After eighteen years of marriage, the “first thing” about love has long disappeared, but these days I'm thinking it's the fourth, tenth, twentieth, or one-hundred-fifty-sixth thing about love that really matters.

I'm certain that had I kept the big diamond, I never would have had to pick up a dirty sock. I'd probably have more spa days and less worry about my bank balance. But I chose the man who never hesitates to cancel an important appointment in order to come home and give me a desperately needed break from the never-ending demands of my two toddlers. He sends me off to Starbucks or Barnes and Noble for the evening while he whips up his specialty of French toast for the kids. I chose the man who rubbed my feet every single night of my pregnancies. The man who still writes me love notes, even when I'm crabby, buys totally impractical presents, and makes a big embarrassing fuss over my little accomplishments. I chose the man who still couldn't care less about what he wears or about making a lot of money, but will drop everything in a nanosecond to hunt bugs or sword-fight or play chess with our son. I chose the man who treats our daughter like a princess, showering her with the same gentle, faithful regard he's always granted me.

The first thing about love.

I, like Maggie, am left wondering what that is.

What I do know for sure is that the true gems of love are not the Heart of the Ocean blue diamond or the big diamond engagement ring. Rather, it's the ring of music and laughter in my home, a man who daily ushers my and my children's wants and needs ahead of his own, and the faithful pursuit of one heart by another.

—
Kristi Hemingway-Weatherall

Contributors

Tami Absi
(“Live, Love, Laugh”) is a high school English teacher who resides in Dayton, Ohio. During the last three years of her husband Ron's life, she worked as a freelance writer. Now remarried, she has two children, Jackie and Josh, both of whom are pursuing bachelor's degrees in biology at Ohio University. They take after their father, Tony, the scientist.

Judy L. Adourian
(“Come Rain or Come Shine”) is the lucky wife of Jean-Marc and proud mother of two sons. Her personal essays have appeared in several publications, including five previous
Cup of Comfort
^®
anthologies. Judy recently authored “Teaching as a Spiritual Practice,” a religious exploration curriculum for which she received a Unitarian Sunday School Society grant.

Annette M. Bower
(“The Romance of Ordinary Days”) lives, loves, and writes in Regina, Saskatchewan. Her writing appears in anthologies, journals, and magazines in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. She is proud of her three other stories published in the
Cup of
Comfort
^®
series.

Ande Cardwell
(“The Taming of the Green-Eyed Monster”) writes, paints, and kayaks in Bend, Oregon. She and her enduring husband, John, live in a simple little apartment downtown, a spit above the Deschutes River. Ande makes her living giving babies shots — a tough job, but she's good at it.

Priscilla Carr
(“To Love Greatly”), memoirist and poet, has stories published in Adams Media's
Cup of Comfort
^®
and
Hero
anthology series. Her poetry appears in
Grandmother's
Necklace
and
It Has Come to This: Poets of the
Great Mother Conference
. Donald Hall and Robert Bly are her mentors. She is the founder of the Poet's Studio of New Hampshire.